Texas received a final judgment permanently blocking a Biden administration “parole in place” (PIP) policy that would have allegedly allowed over a million illegal aliens to secure citizenship without satisfying “clear” congressionally-issued requirements.
That policy established a process for “certain noncitizen spouses and noncitizen stepchildren of U.S. citizens” to get around federal prohibitions against certain immigration benefits being obtained until after leaving the country and returning in a legal manner, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) press release.
The final judgment was issued on November 7, along with United States District Judge Campbell Parker’s opinion determining that the Biden administration lacks “statutory authority” to implement the PIP program.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, along with 15 other states and co-counsel America First Legal (AFL), filed a lawsuit on August 23 against the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), alleging that the Biden administration was violating the U.S. Constitution in its new agency rule adopted on August 19.
The primary complaint against the DHS rule is that it allows a roundabout path for certain non-legal spouses and stepchildren of U.S. citizens to receive legal permanent status without going through the proper process such as applying for it at an embassy or consulate in one’s home country before becoming a legal citizen. The concern over the DHS rule was that instead of following the protocol established by Congress, the aforementioned illegal aliens would be allowed to stay in the country under “parole,” during which they could apply for citizenship status, all without leaving the country.
Paxton was granted a temporary stay on August 26, blocking the policy while litigation proceeded.
“Once again we have stopped the Biden-Harris Administration’s radical attempts to destroy America’s borders and undermine the rule of law,” Paxton said in a press release.
“This unlawful parole scheme would have rewarded more than 1 million illegal aliens with citizenship and incentivized millions more to break into our country. I look forward to the day when the federal government starts following the law again,” he concluded.
Judge Parker’s opinion concluded in agreement with the 16-state coalition’s claim that the “defendants lack statutory authority … itself to grant parole ‘in place’ to aliens … or to deem parole ‘in place’ as used there to be parole ‘into the United States.’”
Lawsuit by lawsuit, the open borders insanity of the Biden Administration is being rolled back, laying the foundation for President Trump to start promised mass deportations upon re-assuming office.
Happy Friday the 13th! Harris continues to slip behind Trump despite (because?) of their debate on the network of her Best Friend Forever, Haitian immigrants in Ohio accused of eating roof rabbit, Texas blasts Biden Administration overreach (again), Conor McGregor steps into a different kind of ring, a worse than usual remake idea, and American cats meet a variety of grisly ends.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
You know that Harris bounce? Nate Silver says not so much. “I’d also note that Harris’s raw polling averages have DECLINED in most swing states since the start of the DNC. This data is NOT subject to the convention bounce adjustment. She’s had a run of pretty mediocre state polling.”
It’s not surprising that the snap polling, including by groups that conservatives trust, like Trafalgar, is showing that Harris “won” the debate. And I think that’s true. She was more polished, more prepared; she had her canned barbs. But there’s something strange going on here. While she won the debate, Democrats always come across in snap polling as winning the debates. I saw people sharing on X the history of snap polling after debates with Donald Trump, first with Hillary and then with Biden. In every one of those debates—six in total—clear majorities said that Trump lost the debate. I’m not sure what to read into that.
So, it was anger at the moderators, frustration that Trump wasn’t making a lot of the points I thought he could have made, but he was being Trump. And I’ve misjudged his appeal to voters and his electoral success so many times, so it is what it is.
But there’s something else I took away from this—and it’s showing on the screen just to the side of me here. One thing I really noticed throughout was the faces that Harris was making—very condescending, very mocking, very childish, actually. I think that’s the one thing I remember more than anything about the debate.
Now, I think Trump did a very good job, even though he didn’t make the points I thought he could have, like showing how she flip-flopped. He hit hard on the border and the economy, and I think that may have a lasting impact.
What’s showing up in the focus groups—ones I’ve seen not by right-wing groups, but CNN, Reuters, NBC—there seems to be a disconnect between who they think won the debate and how they’re reacting substantively.
Trafalgar was consistent with the others, showing a 15-point win for Harris in terms of who won the debate, but no movement in who people were going to vote for. CNN was interesting—they had an even larger, 20-plus-point win for Harris, but found that on the key issue—voters’ most important issue—the economy, Trump actually improved over pre-debate polling. Similar findings came from Reuters and NBC.
Dana Walden, a senior Disney executive whose portfolio includes ABC News, is one of Vice President Kamala Harris’ “extraordinary friends,” according to a report in the New York Times.
Walden and Harris have known each other since 1994, while their husbands, Matt Walden and Doug Emhoff, have known each other since the 1980s.
Dana Walden has donated to dozens of Democrats and contributed to Harris’ political campaigns since at least 2003, when she ran for district attorney in San Francisco.
While the legacy media has yet to find any evidence of pet consumption that it’s willing to accept, there are some much larger issues regarding the crisis that has been created in Springfield through the importation of nearly 20,000 Haitian illegals.
Former Ohio State Representative Kyle Koehler has sounded a warning regarding the consequences that have followed the Biden administration’s policy that gave temporary protected status to more than 100,000 Haitian migrants, including those relocated to Springfield.
BREAKING:
Former Ohio State Rep. Kyle Koehler (@repkoehler) has made SHOCKING revelations about the illegal Haitian crisis in Springfield, Ohio during a recent speech.
1.) The Haitian illegals in Ohio are given $600-$1600 per month on Debit Cards through the Refugee Cash… pic.twitter.com/aWDyVcx7b3
Among the concerns raised by Koehler are the strain on the local school system with more than 1,600 non-English speaking students now enrolled and Haitian refugees who are 20 years old being placed Freshman High School classrooms with 13 year old kids.
Koehler also voiced concern over an individual who is renting his 63 homes to the relocated Haitians for as little as $250 per month, with 20-25 individuals living in each home.
Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) has also weighed in on the controversy, saying that he too has heard from Springfield residents complaining that pets and wildlife were being abducted and that health services are being severely strained by an influx of individuals with communicable diseases like TB and HIV.
The community of 60,000 residents is clearly facing serious issues related to the open border policies of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
When tales of Haitian immigrants eating cats emerged on social media this week, it suddenly focused attention on the city of Springfield, Ohio, but now we are learning there’s more to the story:
“Those 20,000 Haitians did not show up overnight or uninvited. Though flown in by the federal government, they were not forced on the city by the federal government. Elections have consequences. Springfield voted for this. They signaled their virtue, their signal was seen, and virtue arrived. This is what they wanted. This is what they got. They’ll have to deal with the consequences.”
(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Much commentary has focused on whether it’s true that pets are being killed and eaten by the Haitians, but that’s not really the point. The point is why Springfield became the destination for thousands of Haitians (who may or may not eat cats).
It’s a long story. First of all, you’ll find liberals insisting that these Haitians are not illegal immigrants. Research further, however, and you learn that most of them entered the country illegally, crossing the U.S.-Mexico border after making their way through Central America. After Haiti descended into its latest crisis, the Biden administration granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to all Haitians in the U.S., so you may say that they have been retroactively (but temporarily) “legalized.”
Now let’s talk about Springfield, which is a “blue” island of liberalism in a sea of Republican “red.” Ohio was once a battleground state, closely contested in every presidential election, and then Trump came along and the Buckeye State has now become a GOP stronghold. Springfield was a city of 58,662 residents before the Haitian influx, and the city sits in Clark County (population 136,000) which voted 61% for Trump in 2020.
You see that, if the Democrats can turn these Haitians into voters, they can make Clark County “blue,” and a similar calculus is being applied nationwide by the Biden administration’s immigration policy. Democrats insist that the “Great Replacement” is a right-wing conspiracy theory, but we can see them doing it — blatantly, deliberately, in front of our eyes — in places like Springfield. And this brings us to the late Warren Copeland.
For most of the past three decades, Copeland was the mayor of Springfield. He was a professor at Wittenberg University, a local institution affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Anyone who knows anything about the ELCA will tell you it is the pluperfect example of degenerate liberal Protestantism. “The ELCA has drifted so far into pagan goddess worship that to call it ‘Lutheranism’ is an insult to Luther; to call it ‘Christian’ is blasphemy,” as I wrote in 2016. Copeland was a radical obsessed with “social justice,” and the fact that Springfield repeatedly elected him as their mayor tells you something about the politics of the city. Indeed, Springfield eagerly welcomed the influx of Haitians. Read this article from December 2022:
A surge in the number of Springfield residents from Haiti has resulted in an outpouring of language assistance and additional forms of help from the Springfield City School District and others who are trying to meet their needs.
Social Justice destroys everything it touches.
Citizens have questions to City Council about vetting of Haitian refugees in Sylacauga, Alabama. City Council: “Meeting adjourned.”
For the first time in EU history, Germany is at the forefront of immigration suspension. Other EU countries will follow.
The Schengen Area…is an area encompassing 29 European countries that have officially abolished border controls at their mutual borders.
Reuters reports Germany Tightens Controls at All Borders in Immigration Crackdown.
Germany’s government announced plans to impose tighter controls at all of the country’s land borders in what it called an attempt to tackle irregular migration and protect the public from threats such as Islamist extremism.
The controls within what is normally a wide area of free movement – the European Schengen zone – will start on Sept. 16 and initially last for six months, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said on Monday.
The government has also designed a scheme enabling authorities to reject more migrants directly at German borders, Faeser said, without adding details on the controversial and legally fraught move.
The restrictions are part of a series of measures Germany has taken to toughen its stance on irregular migration in recent years following a surge in arrivals, in particular people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East.
Recent deadly knife attacks in which the suspects were asylum seekers have stoked concerns over immigration. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for a knife attack in the western city of Solingen that killed three people in August.
Polls show it is also voters’ top concern in the state of Brandenburg, which is set to hold elections in two weeks.
Scholz and Faeser’s centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) are fighting to retain control of the government there, in a vote billed as a test of strength of the SPD ahead of next year’s federal election.
“The intention of the government seems to be to show symbolically to Germans and potential migrants that the latter are no longer wanted here,” said Marcus Engler at the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research.
Seems like Germans are getting tired of all that vibrant raping and stabbing diversity…
On Wednesday, a federal court ruled in favor of Elon Musk’s X Corp in its case challenging California’s content moderation laws, citing free speech violations. X Corp filed a lawsuit to block the controversial law, which took effect on January 1, 2024.
The legislation requires social media companies to disclose details of their content moderation policies to the state or face civil penalties.
The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco overturned a previous lower court’s decision that ruled against pausing enforcement of the state law. The panel of three judges decided the law facially violated the First Amendment, Reuters reported.
“X Corp. is likely to succeed in showing that the Content Category Report provisions facially violate the First Amendment,” Judge Milan D. Smith, Jr. wrote in his case opinion.
In the complaint filed in Sept. 2023, X Corporation argued that Assembly Bill 587 violates the company’s First Amendment rights because it pressures “companies such as X Corp. to remove, demonetize, or deprioritize constitutionally-protected speech that the State deems undesirable or harmful” which “interferes with the constitutionally-protected editorial judgments” of the company.
For free speech advocates, we often feel that other citizens have become passive observers as an anti-free speech movement grows around us, threatening our “indispensable right.”
One of the most infamous figures in this movement has been former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has long been the smiling face of censorship. As the head of the Labour Party, Blair pushed through some of the early crackdowns on free speech in the United Kingdom. He is now calling for global censorship to expand these efforts.
In an interview on LBC Radio, Blair declared:
“The world is going to have to come together and agree on some rules around social media platforms. It’s not just how people can provoke hostility and hatred but I think… the impact on young people particularly when they’ve got access to mobile phones very young and they are reading a whole lot of stuff and receiving a whole lot of stuff that I think is really messing with their minds in a big way.”
Remember, when the want to crackdown on “misinformation,” the sort of things they want to ban are opinions contrary to their social justice agenda. Such as “the Chinese coronavirus came from a lab” or “there are only two biological sexes.”
More of that voting fraud Democrats swear doesn’t exist. “Illegal Alien Charged With Stealing U.S. Citizen’s Identity to Vote in Elections. She voted in the 2016 and 2020 primaries and general elections.”
The Biden Administration wants Texas to cede Fronton Island to federal control. Texas Governor Greg Abbott told them to get stuffed.
I am in receipt of a letter from the U.S. section of the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) to the Texas General Land Office (GLO) … given that it concerns actions taken under Operation Lone Star to secure Texas’ southern border around Fronton Island against the ongoing invasion of Texas by transnational criminal cartels — a crisis created and incentivized by your Administration,” Abbott wrote.
Abbott added that the letter “alleges that GLO has altered the flow of the Rio Grande by engaging in activities on Fronton Island without USIBWC’s approval.”
“It also alleges that [the] GLO trespassed on federal land in the process of facilitating cleanup and security efforts on the Island … That agency responded in a letter … detailing that GLO has not engaged in construction activities at all, and, in any event, Fronton Island is state-owned land.”
Abbott then responded to the United States Section of the International Boundary and Water Commissioner Maria-Elena Giner’s request that Fronton Island be returned to its pre-construction conditions: “You are either unaware of, or indifferent to, what those ‘pre-construction conditions’ were.”
Before Texas secured Fronton Island, Abbott wrote, “[T]ransnational criminal cartels had assumed practical control of the densely vegetated Island and used it to terrorize Texas communities.”
He recounted occasions when authorities found the criminal cartels to be using the “thick vegetation” to “stash weapons, plant explosives, evade apprehension, and engage in open warfare against rival cartels and against state and federal officers.”
“Are you aware that your appointee is asking Texas to return grenades and rocket launchers along with IEDs to the Island?” he asked the Biden administration.
Abbott continued, “Your open-border policies have allowed an invasion at the southern border and incentivized criminal activity that threatens the lives of Texas law enforcement, soldiers, and citizens.”
“Yet … the federal government has refused to enforce federal laws — even in dangerous areas like Fronton Island.”
“I determined that Texas could not ignore an ongoing invasion of its sovereign territory,” Abbott said of his decision on October 5, 2023 to move a “heavily armed invasion force” onto Fronton Island.
He then addressed USIBWC’s complaint that Texas had built “two sediment bridges.”
“Your Administration’s letter betrays a basic misunderstanding of facts on the ground, and its claims are unsupported by either science or common sense.”
Dwight has been sending me tidbits on the ongoing meltdown among government officials in New York City following FBI raids. Like this: “Paranoid police officials meeting in parking lots as fed raids leave NYPD, City Hall in shock.” “Law enforcement sources telling The Post that they’re afraid NYPD headquarters is bugged and their words are being recorded.” Plus New York City Mayor Eric Adams evidently has several burner phones, which is both highly suspicious and probably justified. And since Adams is reportedly using the messaging app Signal, presumably they’re modern Android or iPhones, which are: A.) More expensive than classic burner phones, and B.) Probably not conducive to quick SIM card swaps, ala Stringer Bell on The Wire.
Anyway, NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban just resigned.
Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori dead at 86. Fujimori revived Peru’s economy and destroyed the Maoist Shining Path guerillas, but in the end he too fell prey to Peru’s long history of government abuse of power and corruption. In the end, he too was corrupt and committed human rights abuses…and was still arguably the most successful (and important) President in Peru’s troubled history.
“The head of the UN wants to create a fake bank that will circumvent EU and US sanctions against Russian banks.”
Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham pushed back against a Biden-Harris administration proposal to “lease nearly 150,000 offshore acres to an energy company (Hecate Energy) with no experience in wind projects.” But it’s easy to understand why the Biden Administration wants to hand the assignment to Hecate: They donate lots of money to Democrats.
Alan Dershowitz announces he’s leaving the Democratic Party over its “anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, anti-Zionist convention.” One wonders what took him so long.
Remember Taral Patel the Ft. Bend democrat who faked hate crimes against himself? Now he’s facing even more felony charges. “Last week a grand jury indicted him on four felony counts of Online Impersonation and four misdemeanor charges including Online Impersonation and Misrepresentation of Identity with intent to ‘harm.'”
Self-cleaning litter box has the unfortunate downside of killing your cat.
Rick Beato interviews bassist Tony Levin of Peter Gabriel and King Crimson fame. It’s an interesting interview, especially the part about how he sold all his stuff to go on tour with Buddy Rich, only to find out that Rich’s old bassist had agreed to come back, so he was out of a job…
“Optronic Technologies, Inc., better known to backyard astronomers as the parent company of both Orion Telescopes & Binoculars and Meade Instruments, has shut its offices and storefront in Watsonville, California.” Actual manufacturing was done in Tijuana, so I’m not sure how much California’s new minimum wage law had an effect.
There are rumors that Barbie director Greta Gerwig wants to make an all female Fight Club remake. That’s about as good an idea as an all-male reboot of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
Comedian Kevin Hart’s chain of vegetarian restaurants in LA closed down. 1. How’s that minimum wage working out for you, California? 2. Vegetarian restaurants aren’t even profitable in LA. 3. Stick to comedy. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Both unemployment and inflation numbers in the Biden Recession are lies, the DNC finishes up as bad as everyone thought it would be, why supporting Russia’s illegal war of territorial aggression in Ukraine is not a conservative position, Canada goes on strike, crappy modern art prices collapse, and Disney ships The Acolyte to a farm in the country where it can run around all day.
For the past few days, rumors and reports have indicated that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics was going to downwardly revise their assessment of the number of jobs created from April 2023 to March 2024 “by up to 1 million. This means that all ‘beats’ recorded in the past year will have been misses and the US job market is in far worse shape than the admin[istration] would admit.”
The revision is out, and while it’s not quite a million, it’s still really darn high — 818,000 fewer jobs were created in that yearlong period than were initially reported.
In a normal presidential campaign, where the nominee and her running mate did interviews and press conferences, this would be a major headache. Luckily, Kamala Harris and her campaign have more or less unilaterally decided she doesn’t have to do them anymore, and figures like Michael Steele, Rick Wilson, and Leslie Gray Streeter have concurred that presidential candidates answering questions in interviews are an unneeded relic of a bygone era. The candidate will tell us all we need to know or deserve to know in her stump speech.
The president and his team want to communicate the story of successful economic management. The vice president running for her own term doesn’t have the luxury of insisting the economy is doing gangbusters and that inflation is defeated when so many Americans, looking at empty storefronts and office spaces, are concluding otherwise.
The other half of the Misery index, inflation, is up higher than the official rate as well:
Since Kamala Harris took office:
Eggs are UP 46.8%. Peanut butter is UP 42.8%. Crackers are UP 40.3%. Baby food and formula are UP 30.1%. Inflation has skyrocketed by OVER 20%, Delivery services are UP 29.7%. #KamalaCosts#Kamalanomics
This is going to have a lot of Democrats going to Brown Alert: “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Suspends Presidential Campaign, Endorses Trump.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “suspended” his presidential campaign Friday afternoon, explaining that he would remain on the ballot in many states to give his supporters a protest-vote option but that he would remove his name from the ballot in battleground states, where his presence might help Kamala Harris, the candidate he views as the most significant threat to his populist political project.
Kennedy launched his quixotic run for America’s highest office after boosting his national profile during the Covid pandemic. Already a prominent vaccine skeptic and a scion of America’s most famous political dynasty, Kennedy emerged as a leader of the populist backlash against pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates, writing a bestselling book, The Real Anthony Fauci, which cast the face of the federal government’s Covid response as a power-hungry bureaucrat intent on using health emergencies as a pretext to control the public.
After making a splash through his appearances in independent media and building a following among well-heeled Silicon Valley donors, Kennedy abandoned his effort to get on the Democratic primary ballot, accusing the party of sabotaging him. Having failed to gain traction as an independent candidate and with his campaign coffers near empty, Kennedy finally announced the suspension of his campaign in an upbeat speech from Phoenix, Arizona, in which he argued that he and his supporters succeeded in shaking up America’s political establishment.
“We proved them wrong,” Kennedy said of the those who doubted his ability to mount a campaign as an independent. “We did it because, beneath the radar of mainstream media organs, we inspired a massive political movement.”
Kennedy went on to attack Democrats for “disenfranchising American voters” by swapping in Kamala Harris for Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, casting the party he called home for decades as a corrupt cabal of elites who carefully stage manage the political process through their influence over the media.
“The mainstream media was once the guardian of the First Amendment and democratic principles, and it’s joined this systemic attack on democracy,” Kennedy said. “The media justifies their censorship on the grounds of combatting misinformation, but governments and oppressors don’t censor lies, they don’t fear lies, they fear the truth and that’s what they censor.”
The DNC was a parade of horribles, displaying every form of sin, debauchery, and malign political philosophy invented by mankind—all in one room. We’ve spent the last four days being hectored by screeching harridans who demand that we reject the values that made the United States the greatest country in history and replace them with a feminist nightmare.
We learned that a Harris-Walz administration would put abortion on demand, for any and every reason, at the top of its priority list because, in the Democrats’ view, we are not killing enough babies in this country. They’re going to squeeze every dead baby they can out of their four years in office if they make it to the White House.
We also learned that they’re going to drag us into more wars and conflicts and encourage more terror attacks with their flaccid foreign policy—as they hobnob with All the Right Globalists in Davos.
We’ll be looking at Soviet-style price controls, unbridled socialism, and more regulations on businesses.
Kamala and Co. believe that the economy is just humming along, choosing to ignore runaway inflation, rampant joblessness, and the inability of many people to purchase homes, so they’ll double down on the Biden-Harris economic policies.
They’ll destroy children and families by encouraging mental illnesses like transgenderism, using the schools as a vehicle to spread their destructive lies about gender.
And speaking of schools, never forget that Kamala wants to bring back school busing in the name of equity while destroying school choice, which actually results in equity by putting educational decisions in parents’ hands. In June 2019, busing was discussed in a Democratic debate when Harris was still in the race. Afterward, her campaign confirmed that she “supported busing as a method for school integration.” And God only knows what they’ll do to homeschooling if they win in November.
And, of course, the border will remain wide open, with rapists, child traffickers, fentanyl pushers, and drug cartels at liberty to walk into the United States almost unimpeded.
Pro-lifers and peaceful protesters will continue to be locked up while violent felons roam free under a Harris-Walz administration.
A man who says he joined Tim Walz on a trip to communist China is speaking out about his experience of traveling to the country with the future vice-presidential candidate.
“It was almost a daily revelation of how much he adores the communist regime,” the former student told Alpha News.
For over a decade, Tim Walz traveled to and from China. First arriving in the country in 1989, Walz taught at a high school in partnership with a nonprofit program affiliated with Harvard University. During this first trip, Walz was visiting Hong Kong when the Tiananmen Square protests began in April. Those protests ended in June when the communist government massacred protestors on June 3-4, 1989.
After the massacre, Walz later took a train to Beijing to visit the square, according to the New York Times.
Upon returning to the United States after that first trip, Walz told local newspapers how much he enjoyed his time in China. On June 4, 1994, Walz married Gwen Whipple on the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Gwen told a local newspaper that Walz “wanted to have a date he’ll always remember,” the Wall Street Journal reported. The couple spent their honeymoon in China, according to local reports from the time.
The Star Herald/Newspapers.com
After this first trip to China, Walz founded a company that took students on summer trips to China. Walz said in a 2016 interview that he has traveled to China “about 30 times” as a teacher and member of Congress. The New York Post recently reported that Walz was a visiting fellow at a state-run university in China as recently as 2007.
Now, a former student who says he joined Walz on a 1995 trip to China is speaking to Alpha News about the experience. That student, Shad, asked that we not use his last name.
For several weeks, Walz and his group of students explored China together in the summer of 1995, Shad said. They saw Tiananmen Square, walked along the Great Wall of China, and traversed the country. However, the former student says he was struck by Walz’s adoration for China and its communist ideology.
“There was no doubt he was a true believer,” Shad said. “I’ve been trying to tell people this for 30 years. Nobody wanted to listen.
“At night, we’d go out, we’d walk the street fairs. We’d be buying souvenirs and Tim was always buying the little red book. He said he gave them as gifts … I saw him buy at least a dozen on the trip,” he said.
Several congressional Democrats facing tight reelection bids, particularly those in tossup or GOP-leaning states or House districts, are skipping the party’s nominating convention in Chicago this week.
Montana Sen. Jon Tester has not yet endorsed Vice President and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, and he was the red state’s only delegate to withhold a vote backing Harris, according to Montana Public Radio.
Instead of attending the Democratic National Convention, Tester will hold a fundraiser, farm and campaign for his reelection, according to the Montana Free Press.
Nevada Sen. Jacky Rosen told The New York Times that she would be campaigning for her reelection this week and needed to be close to her home state.
Tester, Brown and Rosen are three of the six Senate Democrats most vulnerable to losing reelection, according the the news outlet Roll Call.
Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine, declined to join the virtual vote to nominate Harris, the Bangor Daily News reported. He also wouldn’t say who he’s voting for in November.
Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, told CNN he rarely attends conventions, but he has attended each convention during his time in Congress, according to The Hill newspaper.
New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich told Scripps News he has commitments that conflict with the convention.
Plus Rep Yadira Caraveo (D-CO), Rep. Val Hoyle (D-OR), Rep. Mary Peltola (D-AK), and Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) also skipped the convention.
The good doctor is listed online as an “internist” in McKees Rocks, a borough in western Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County, known locally as “the Rocks.”
Campaign finance filings report Young’s practice is located on Heckel Road in McKees and list a 412 area code phone number. But her office does not appear to exist at this address and the number is not in service. Moreover, none of the receptionists attached to doctors’ offices located in close proximity to Young’s office address in McKees have ever heard of her. That’s peculiar in and of itself. But a search of campaign finance records only adds to the intrigue.
Someone identified as Adrienne Young has been making substantial contributions to a left-of-center political action committee known as ActBlue, according to Federal Election Commission records.
ActBlue was founded in 2009 to help Democratic Party candidates and allied “progressive” groups raise funds through a multiheaded hydra serving as a conduit for left-wing donors, with two more arms—ActBlue Charities and ActBlue Civics—funneling money to 501(c)(3) and (c)(4) clients, respectively.
Restoration News is still attempting to contact the individual listed in campaign finance documents as Adrienne Young. Records list her residing on Leet Road in Sewickley, Pennsylvania. These records show that since 2017, Young has made 17,342 in contributions to ActBlue totaling $209,670.06—which averages seven contributions per day.
However, there is no one named Adrienne Young residing at that or any other Leet Road address. Moreover, there is no one named Adrienne Young who could be described as a “mega-donor” in the same vein as say a George Soros, the source of the Open Society Foundations’ billions, or former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Moreover, mega-donors do not typically make multiple transactions over an extended period of time, but instead make lump sum donations.
To add to the confusion, one online search for Young does suggest she has more than 44 years of experience in the medical field and graduated from the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine in 1979. It raises a key question: Such a credentialed person should not be so difficult to find. If she’s out there, Young could be the victim of identity theft. If she’s not, then she might be a fictitious person used to pump funds into ActBlue.
“Smurfing” involves repackaging large sums of money into smaller, individual transactions to appear less suspicious and avoid scrutiny from law enforcement officials. Is “Adrienne Young” a cover for such an operation, benefiting Democrats?
While it is indisputably the case that ActBlue is ringing the bell with hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions, it’s not evident the smaller contributions that translate over time into larger sums are coming from an individual donor.
One of the more recent contributions to ActBlue leading back to the donor identified as Young came on March 16, 2023, in the amount of $1196.50. That’s not an unusual amount for an individual, but what is unusual is folding that amount into more than 17,000 contributions made over the span of several years. The donor identified as Young was actively contributing to ActBlue at least through part of this year with a donation of $429.00 made on April 30, 2024. If a smurfing operation is underway, it may not be limited to what’s flowing into ActBlue.
There were also 991 donations made in Young’s name totaling $26,481 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, 904 donations totaling $22,881.72 to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, and $16,190.56 to the Progressive Turnout Project, a left-of-center PAC based in Chicago.
Once again, multiple small donations add up to large donations over time. Young is listed, for example, as making a $869 donation to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on May 12, 2019, $1,776 to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee on May 23, 2024, and $800.00 to the Progressive Turnout Project on April 12, 2024. Apparently, Young has been an active donor, at least up until a few months ago.
Allegations involving multiple donations to ActBlue that might possibly involve identify and credit card theft have caught the attention of Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares who is conducting his own investigation. The attorney general has sent a letter to ActBlue that is available on X. For its part, ActBlue has pushed back against Miyares in a statement describing the Republican attorney general’s actions as a partisan exercise.
How expansive smurfing might be across the country isn’t certain. But the common denominator in these questionable transactions—ActBlue—certainly is.
Restoration News has identified another potential fictional donor, Wendy Urbanowicz, residing in Vancouver, Washington. Campaign finance records show that since 2020 she has made 28,659 donations to ActBlue totaling $260,196—averaging 17 contributions per day.
Urbanowicz supposedly made another 720 donations totaling $12,099 to the Democratic Congressional Committee; 609 donations totaling $12,365 to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee; and 259 donations totaling $11,421 to Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz.
But an online search for Urbanowicz is every bit as fruitless as a search for Adrienne Young. She’s listed in FEC filings as a 73-year-old residing in Vancouver, Washington, with a 360 area code phone number. Once again, there is no record of Urbanowicz in Vancouver and the number is not active.
It’s always possible someone is deceased or moved away. But some of the contributions listed by the FEC for Urbanowicz are as recent as May 2024. Just to cite a few examples, a donation from Urbanowicz in the amount of $2,955 was made on March 22 and a $193 donation was made on May 12.
Not all of the FEC records pop up in an online search. This one, for instance, for ActBlue produces an error message.
But Urbanowicz and Young are both listed as donors to the far-left PAC EMILY’s List, which backs Democrats. In these filings, Urbanowicz is listed at a P.O. Box in Vancouver with the ZIP code 98668. We’re still attempting to track down Urbanowicz, but early indications are that no one with her name resides in Vancouver or nearby.
Chicago is living down to its reputation. “Texas Delegate Robbed at Gunpoint Near Democratic Convention in Downtown Chicago.”
A member of the Texas Democratic delegation, who arrived in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention this week, was robbed at gunpoint while walking with a friend in the city early Wednesday morning.
The delegate’s name is unknown at this time, CWBChicago reported. The outlet said it is “not identifying him by name because he is a crime victim.” No one is in custody and detectives are still investigating the crime, the Chicago Police Department confirmed in a statement obtained by National Review.
The victim and his friend were walking near Allegro Royal Sonesta Hotel Chicago when a gunman in a ski mask pulled up in a black Range Rover and robbed them around 2 a.m. The robber stole a 25-year-old man’s wallet and hotel-room key in the same vicinity before turning his attention to the delegate and his associate. No injuries were reported in either incident.
The prime suspects are described as two black men wearing all black clothing and ski masks. They are still believed to be at large.
The Chicago police issued an alert warning the community about the robbers Thursday morning, saying they were linked to another robbery around the same time that the delegate and the two other victims were mugged. The pair are also responsible for two more robberies early Tuesday and Monday morning.
Sounds like the sorts of career criminals that Democrats go out of their way to make sure remains on the streets to victimize people…
Washington, D.C., councilman Trayon White (D.) was arrested Sunday on a bribery charge, the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia announced, over allegations that he agreed to take cash payments in exchange for pressuring government employees to extend public-safety contracts with two firms.
White, who chairs the D.C. Council’s Committee on Recreation, Libraries, and Youth Affairs and oversees the D.C. Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, allegedly sought a sum of $156,000 — three percent of total contract value — for his work. In its press release, the office of U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves noted that White’s alleged corruption was caught on film.
“According to the complaint, White’s agreement with a confidential human source (the owner of the companies) — including the source’s payments to White of $35,000 in cash on four separate occasions (June 26, July 17, July 25, and August 9, 2024_ and the source showing White a document reflecting how White’s three-percent cut was calculated based on those contracts — was captured on video,” the release reads.
Graves wrote in a statement that the time-sensitive nature of the case led his office to act quickly.
“Because the investigation into the alleged bribery scheme involved contracts that could soon be awarded and other potential official acts that could be taken, our Office took swift steps to address the alleged crimes we were investigating,” Graves said.
White is perhaps best known for a 2018 video he published in which he accused Jewish financiers of controlling the weather.
“Man, it just started snowing out of nowhere this morning, man,” White said. “Y’all better pay attention to this climate control, man, this climate manipulation. And D.C. keep talking about ‘we a resilient city.’ And that’s a model based off the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities, man. Be careful.”
It’s time to talk to some of the bizarrely non-conservative conservatives, who for unfathomable reasons are fans of Putin’s Russia. We call these people “Brosheviks.”
The simple background is that Kiev is far older than Moscow, and various groups controlled both territories. Ukraine was independent as a nation, then captured by the USSR. The USSR spent seventy plus years abusing and starving Ukraine to the tune of more than 30 million people. After the USSR collapsed it became independent, and the poorest country in Europe, looted and raped by its occupiers.
Ukraine had a lot of corruption because it was a former Soviet state. They all do. It has far less corruption than Russia. Remember the Clinton Foundation washing $650 mil through Russia? And Uranium deals? Etc? That’s just the stuff we know about large scale.
~~
The USSR, though, and now Russia has the greatest propaganda organ the world has ever seen. Witness:
Literally every Russian military development—tank, aircraft, everything, led to wails of, “Oooh! The Russians have got us this time! ZOMG! State of the art! We’ll be catching up for generations! Panic! Gloom, despair, and agony on me!”
Then we’d capture or acquire one and it would be shit tier garbage. Every fucking time. The MiG25: Shit that couldn’t dogfight or maneuver and had no loiter time. The T72: Shit armor, shit fire control, overall shit. The T90: Such shit a Bradley can take it out with 25mm. The vaunted AK47: If you’ve ever shot one you understand it’s a weapon for illiterate peasants and yes, jams like you wouldn’t believe if you haven’t handled one. That long stroke gas piston loves corrosion, debris, and mud and turns into an unergonomic club.
The USSR persuaded the Western world, especially the left, that they were some sort of victims, not a larger, less-effective murder machine as the Nazis, but still a mass murder machine with a higher body count. Hanging a Swastika banner will get you excoriated (and should), but hang up the Hammer and Sickle, and well, we have to be tolerant of divergent viewpoints.
We really fucking don’t. Commies are just as much subhuman shit as the Nazis. But that propaganda.
Snip.
“Ukraine has corruption! Vlad is saving us from the New World Order!”
Name a single nation we’ve ever assisted in war that wasn’t corrupt. Including our own.
Also, if you’ve paid attention the last decade (you obviously haven’t paid attention the last decade), Ukraine was in the process of flushing the corrupt leaders, most of whom were…friends of Vladimir Sputum.
~~
“Ukraine has Nazis!”
Probably a few. So does the US. So does Russia, since the head of Wagner Group, named after Hitler’s favorite composer, LITERALLY HAS SS INSIGNIA TATTOOED ON HIS CHEST, COLLARS AND SHOULDERS. Are you that fucking gullible and retarded? Apparently.
Also, the POWs from the alleged Nazi Azov Battalion were exchanged for Russian POWs, no issue. So no (alleged) Nazis were actually stopped or tried.
Also, those “Nazis” are taking orders from a Jewish comedian. Vlad explains this as “They’re a special kind of Nazi that isn’t necessarily anti-semitic, but still Nazis.” So, National Socialists…like yourself, Vlad?
Snip.
“Russia warned Ukraine not to join NATO! They can’t be aggressive like that.”
Ukraine has not joined NATO, and your ex doesn’t get to tell you who to date.
~~
“Russia is rightfully afraid of NATO aggression!”
THIS Cold War bullshit again? Are you liberal, or retarded?
~~
“Why won’t anyone stand with Russia against the New World Order? Vlad is a hero!”
Such a hero his allies are Lil Kim in North Korea, and the Assahola in Iran. That’s who you’re supporting here, dipshit.
~~
“You’re going to find out that Ukraine is carefully making it look like they’re winning! There’s this huge push in March/April 2023/2024 that’s going to end it. After Ukraine is worn out fighting Russian garbage, the A-team is going to wreck them!”
It’s been 2.5 years. The Russian Airborne died the first day. The vaunted Spaznutz met Ukrainian reservists and got slaughtered like the shit tier, third world, all-show-and-no-dick bitches they actually are. It’s getting worse. Russians have been seen on scooters (the step on kind that populate cities like cockroaches) and Chinese golf carts. They’re losing T54s on a recurring basis, having run out of modern (1960s) tanks. It’s become a joke at this point.
Snip.
FACT: Russia invaded Ukraine because it wanted to seize territory it’s not entitled to, and is getting its incompetent shit tier military ass kicked by a third world nation. Even if they “win” a few counties of utter wasteland that are wrecked more than No Man’s Land in WWI, they’ve lost their credibility and military footprint for decades to come.
Ukraine also hit Marinovka airbase in Volgograd, some 500km from the front lines, with drones using ball bearing warheads like on HIMARS tungsten rounds, hitting number of hangers and destroying at least three Su-34 and one Su-24 aircraft.
Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) has fired a whistleblower following allegations that it was “unlawfully billing the state Medicaid program” for the purposes of child gender modification.
The whistleblower, Vanessa Sivadge, provided a statement to the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo with details about how she was fired after revealing the “sex-change procedures ongoing at the hospital, but also the fraud and deception related to the illegal billing practices to Medicaid in having these procedures covered by taxpayers.”
Sivadge stated that after her initial story went public, TCH put her “on leave.” She was then fired on Friday, August 16.
Prior to Sivadge blowing the whistle, she stated that she submitted a religious accommodation request to transfer to another department. She said her role in the endocrinology clinic “was devastating” because her role as a nurse “primarily involved providing medication refills and working with physicians to answer questions from parents about treatment plans.”
Sivadge added that she “would like to challenge this in court” and asked for donations for her legal defense.
“No regrets,” wrote Sivadge on social media.
Her story first became public back in June, following a previous TCH whistleblower, Eithan Haim, alleging that TCH had continued to provide “gender-affirming care” to minor children even after stating that it would stop doing so.
Following Sivadge talking with Rufo, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sent agents to her home to “intimidate and threaten her,” in Rufo’s words.
Haim has been visited by agents of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and has been indicted on four felony counts of violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.
The Harris County Commissioners Court voted along partisan lines last week to revive a guaranteed basic income (GBI) program for select residents with more restrictions and higher costs, although a previous version was halted by state courts earlier this year.
Under the original version of the program, named Uplift Harris, the county planned to send “no-strings-attached” $500 monthly stipends to 1,928 recipients for 18 months, but Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed suit challenging the constitutionality of the program last April. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of Texas (SCOTX) halted the plan indefinitely.
Now Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo says the revised program, Uplift Harris 2.0, will provide preloaded cards with restrictions on how the funds may be spent.
“That’s not the spirit of a guaranteed income program,” said Hidalgo. “If the state gets in the way of this and the program becomes stuck in court again then the funds will be reallocated to programs that already exist to support people living in poverty.”
Hidalgo did not specify the restrictions on how recipients could spend funds but said the debit cards could be used for “medicine, groceries, et cetera.” The county has not yet published details of the revised GBI.
Commissioners will cover the costs of Uplift Harris with nearly $21 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funds, of which $17,350,000 will be distributed to selected residents and $1 million will fund a study of the program’s effectiveness.
Administrative costs charged by nonprofit GiveDirectly were originally $1,740,500, but under the revised GBI will rise another $400,000.
All the better to rake off more social justice graft…
“Warner Bros Discovery pledges $8.5 billion on Nevada Studios pending tax credit approval.” Moving production out of California makes a lot of sense, though $8.5 billion is a lot of money for a company with a market cap of $19.5 billion.
Critical Drinker watches the new Snow White trailer. “As for the dwarfs, [these] things are absolute nightmare fuel.” And it’s amusing to see Rachel Zegler go from calling the original “dated” to calling it “beloved” is an amusing turnabout.
In life you reap what you sow, and if what you sow happens to be a $180 million vanity project made by a feminist activist promoted way beyond her abilities with practically no experience, only a vague understanding of the subject matter, and even less talent for actual storytelling, starring a blank-faced charisma-vacuum with all the acting talent of a comatose Steven Seagal, and incorporating some of the most cringe-inducing scenes ever committed to film, then, well, what you reap will be a big old dose of cancel.
More: “Man, it’s got to be a bitter pill for Kathleen Kennedy to swallow. [The Acolyte] represented her ultimate vision for Star Wars: Female focused, female led, and female directed. And, funnily enough, it was rejected by absolutely everyone.” And: “The cold, harsh truth is that the mythical ‘modern audience’ that Lucasfilm have been chasing for 10 years now simply doesn’t exist, never has existed, and never will exist.”
Just a bit more on The Acolyte from How it Should have Ended:
This just in: Crappy modern art is now bringing in 1/10th of what it was. Still outperforming NFTs, though…
John Richardson of the No Lawyers – Only Guns And Money blog is running for the NRA Board of Directors. Since he has done such and admirable job of covering every twist and turn of the organization’s dysfunction during the terminal years of the LaPierre regime, I can only imagine that he’ll be an excellent addition to the board.
Rotten Tomatoes drops the audience score to hide how much viewers actually hate woke films. Sounds like they just made their site entirely useless.
Real inflation is running about 20%, Kamala parties like it’s 1971, the New York Times is shocked, shocked to discover Hunter Biden asking for state favors for foreign cronies, gold hits new highs, laughing at an old SNL skit is now a thoughtcrime, and an update on Intel’s woes.
The New York Times reports that the federal government is accelerating the naturalization of immigrants in America as part of a process of “reshaping the electorate, merely months before a pivotal election,” according to one observer quoted in the piece.
“The federal government is processing citizenship requests at the fastest clip in a decade, moving rapidly through a backlog that built up during the Trump administration and the coronavirus pandemic,” reports the newspaper.
One Honduran woman marveled at the fact that authorities were able to process and approve her application in as little as six months.
The story highlights how many of these new citizens will immediately become eligible to vote in key battleground states, including Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
The piece includes a very revealing quote from Xiao Wang, chief executive of Boundless, a data analysis company.
“The surge in naturalization efficiency isn’t just about clearing backlogs; it’s potentially reshaping the electorate, merely months before a pivotal election,” said Wang.
“Every citizenship application could be a vote that decides Senate seats or even the presidency,” he added.
In other words, knowing that immigrants are far likelier to vote Democrat, the Biden administration is importing them at breakneck speed in order to tip the scales for Kamala Harris.
3.3 million immigrants have become citizens during Biden’s time in office, with data showing that more will vote Democrat than Republican.
This has partly driven the Trump campaign’s efforts to appeal more to “Jamal” and “Enrique,” and not so much “Karen,” although the strategy has caused division amongst Trump’s base.
The legacy media has consistently denounced the idea of mass migration being a deliberate ploy to increase the voter base for Democrats as part of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, while simultaneously admitting it’s happening.
Democrats have declared that they have no confidence in the electorate and must create a new one…
Restaurant owner says that the real inflation rate is closer to 20% over six months:
The owner of four restaurants made this video when inflation was at 3.5%. Today, we’re told that inflation is at 2.9%. He looked at the prices of some products and concluded that the government’s inflation numbers don’t make sense. Since February, food prices have increased:
How does Kamala Harris plan to combat inflation? By channeling Richard Nixon from 1971 and imposing wage and price controls.
After the unoriginal Vice President Kamala Harris stole former President Trump’s proposed ‘no tax on tips’ policy, she’s at it again with yet another recycled idea. This time, she’s echoing President Biden’s actions and rhetoric to crack down on sky-high food prices by proposing the first-ever federal ban on “corporate price-gouging in the food and grocery industries”—a move that reeks of socialism.
“There’s a big difference between fair pricing in competitive markets, and excessive prices unrelated to the costs of doing business,” the Harris campaign wrote in a statement, adding, “Americans can see that difference in their grocery bills.”
The Harris campaign said the vice president will unveil the new federal proposed ban on Friday at a campaign rally in the battleground state of North Carolina as part of a broader economic policy platform. The proposal will ensure food companies can’t exploit consumers to increase profits, according to CBS News, citing Harris-Walz campaign officials.
Harris’ policy speech will also call on the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys to examine corporations violating price-fixing rules. Her remarks are expected to echo Biden’s actions and rhetoric, especially with his war against meat processing companies that he alleges are responsible for higher burger prices at the supermarket.
VP Harris’ campaign argues that lowering Americans’ costs is a function of socialist-style price controls. Yet this is the quickest way to understand that Harris’ economic team has no actual understanding of inflation.
Heritage Foundation’s EJ Antoni explained, “Here’s your “price gouging” narrative: average costs paid by businesses have risen just as much as costs charged to consumers – if businesses are being “greedy,” they’re doing it all wrong…”
Instead of curbing out-of-control government spending, which debt rises $1 trillion every 100 days, and understanding that monetary inflation driven by the Federal Reserve’s money creation is the root cause of inflation, Harris deflects the actual problem: The Fed. She instead goes after big corporations for ‘illegal price gouging.’
Thus unable to understand the disasterous economic policies of the past are doomed to repeat it…
“Conversation Between Musk And Trump Generates Over A Billion Views.” You can see a transcript of the interview here.
In a post last month (“How The Democrats Los Silicon Valley”), I mentioned that top Silicon Valley venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz had endorsed Trump.
Ben Horowitz, in particular, seemed like an unusual Trump supporter, coming from a liberal Jewish background. Now it looks like Trump has another, thanks to his X space with Elon Musk last night: Zynga founder Mark Pincus. During the first Trump administration, Pincus opposed Trump’s “Muslim ban”, but after the leftist celebrations following October 7th last year, he seemed to have some second thoughts about that.
Despite corporate media’s unabashed u-turn to support Kamala Harris, her campaign has been busted creating made-up headlines next to the names of real news outlets to trick people into thinking they’ve stumbled upon the real thing, Axios reports.
Upon hearing the news, The Guardian lost their shit, telling Axios: “While we understand why an organization might wish to align itself with the Guardian’s trusted brand, we need to ensure it is being used appropriately and with our permission. We’ll be reaching out to Google for more information about this practice.”
The ads include links to real articles from the outlets, however the headlines and supporting text were altered.
“Democratic California State Lawmaker Switches To Republican Party…State Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil, who represents the state’s fourth Senate district, said she joined the Senate Republican Caucus and party after deep reflection and to help ‘in their fight to fix California.'”
While Joe Biden was vice president, his son Hunter attempted to obtain State Department assistance in securing a deal for Ukrainian gas company Burisma, of which Hunter was a highly-compensated board member despite having no experience in its industry, the New York Times reported on Tuesday. The revelation of the 2016 episode underscores allegations that Hunter sought to enrich himself by trading on his father’s influence.
The Times report draws on newly-released government records pertaining to Hunter’s pushing of a Burisma deal in Italy. The Biden White House had resisted releasing the files for years, only to relent soon after Biden was pressured into abandoning his reelection bid.
One wonders how long the New York Times would have waited to report this if Biden were still seeking reelection? My guess is never.
Go figure. It’s amazing what some actual reporting — and a withdrawal from a presidential election — can shake loose, no?
Just four short years ago, we were all assured by the Protection Racket Media that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, and that allegations of influence-peddling by the Bidens were just political dirty tricks, right? Right? Wrong. The New York Times’ Ken Vogel reports that Hunter’s efforts to sell influence within the administration were well known during Joe Biden’s term as Vice President. It’s even about Burisma, the company that we were told paid Hunter a lot of money for his energy-industry expertise.
Oh, and the records of it got “withheld” by the Biden administration for “years,” too:
Hunter Biden sought assistance from the U.S. government for a potentially lucrative energy project in Italy while his father was vice president, according to newly released records and interviews.
The records, which the Biden administration had withheld for years, indicate that Hunter Biden wrote at least one letter to the U.S. ambassador to Italy in 2016 seeking assistance for the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where he was a board member.
Well, we did have records in October 2020. Hunter Biden kept records of these dealings on his laptop, which he abandoned in a repair shop. When the New York Post reported on the contents of the laptop, including a number of emails that made clear he leveraged his fathers office to sell influence at Burisma and elsewhere, the media ignored it — even though one of Hunter’s partners (Tony Bobulinski) publicly authenticated the messages when asked.
Nearly four years later, the NYT gets around to the truth. And if you’re questioning the timing, you have good company, because Vogel appears to be somewhat curious about it as well:
The department’s release of documents to The New York Times came shortly after President Biden dropped out of the presidential race, and as his son prepares to stand trial next month on charges of evading taxes on millions of dollars in income from Burisma and other foreign businesses.
Go figure again! It’s as if the cover-up extended as long as Joe Biden had electoral interests to protect. Now that Biden has pulled out of the race, there’s no need to keep covering up for Biden Inc.
“California Sheriff Blasts Harris For Using His Image In “Misleading” Campaign Ad, Says He Supports Trump.” “In light of a recent political ad put out by Kamala Harris featuring Sheriff [Mike] Boudreaux, as well as other local law enforcement, the Sheriff wants to make it abundantly clear that his image is being used without his permission, and he does NOT endorse Harris for President or any other political office.”
The same Jew-haters who drove Columbia University’s president Minouche Shafik off are now coming for Kamala Harris.
Only a short week ago, Harris was heckled by pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protesters, like those who has spilled out from college campuses after October 7. Protesters screamed out at her as she stood on stage repeating her stump speech. As they yelled, Harris tried to shame them. “I’m speaking,” she said, hearkening back to her VP debate against Mike Pence in 2020. “I’m speaking” in context means several things, including an attempt to grab control based on her identity factors: black, female. By identitarian logic, the vice president is oppressed, and by the logic of progressive discourse, that means that she gets to speak first, and that what she has to say carries all that much more weight. An event simply in favor of her candidacy was crashed in New York City on Wednesday night where agitators set off smoke bombs and held up signs saying “No Votes for Bombala’s Genocide.” 14 of them were arrested.
The agitators wanted some kind of response, some kind of indication of what Harris’ policy on Israel and Gaza might be if she gets voted into the White House. And they haven’t gotten it. Meanwhile, there are clearly massive anti-Israel events planned for the Democratic National Convention next week. While Kamala is trying to keep the euphoria going, attempting to dance and sing her way into the White House, her base will be out in the street demanding answers. Will she be lenient like Magill? Bend over backwards like Gay? Or call in a bigger force, like Shafik, because she doesn’t know how to handle it on her own?
The far left of Harris’ party hates Israel. They love Palestinians not for their culture or policies–which include anti-LGBTQ and anti-female regulations as in other strict, Muslim countries–but simply because they are “oppressed.” And Harris can’t handle them. Even at her speech, rarefied identity wasn’t enough to keep them in their place. The campus riots will likely start up again. As soon as the college-bound finish their orientations, they’ll be picking up their marching orders and protest signs to join their comrades on the quad.
There is already noise that Harris would like to throw Israel under the bus, to eradicate funding and arms shipments. The same woman that waved the flag of Ukraine in Congress as she promised to send him endless weapons and aid, may think the aid packages and arms sales to Israel go too far. Harris may sympathize with the protesters.
before his honeymoon [in Communist China in 1994], Walz launched a company called Educational Travel Adventures, which specialized in bringing American students to China. An article in the local Chinese media reported that he and his bride brought 50 students from America. The company continued to send students to China until 2003. It is important to note that operating a business in China requires all kinds of permits—both official and unofficial—from Chinese authorities at the local, provincial, and central levels. These permits were typically obtained either by paying bribes or by securing endorsements, whether tacit or open, from government officials.
Professional atheist Richard Dawkins posts that men and women are different and male boxers shouldn’t be competing with female boxers. Result: Facebook nuked his account.
So what do you do when your software problem brings a customers operations down hard? Well, if you’re Crowdstrike and the customer is Delta airlines, then you slam Delta for not recovering fast enough.
Python Development Foundation suspends developer for enjoying old “Jane, you ignorant slut” skit. I can only imagine the snowflake reactions to the Chevy Chase/Richard Pryor word association skit…
Flock of self-driving Waymo cars in San Francisco honk all night in their parking lot. As you might be able to guess, nearby residents are just thrilled at this development…
Speaking of electric cars, there’s concerning over letting them park in parking garages because of the possibility of them catching fire and the difficulty of extinguishing same.
Remember how Intel said the problem with their chips was microcode? Yeah. That may not be the case (or at least not the whole case), and it may actually be a process problem involving oxidation of vias (i.e., the connection between two metal layers).
Half a year gone already. This week: The debate confirmed that pretty much everything Republican said about Biden being old and out of it was true, people can’t afford housing anymore, the Supreme Court reigns in the administrative state, a whole bunch of layoffs come down the pike, two sorta, kinda coups, fake meat doesn’t pay, and we say farewell to a Texas original. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
President Joe Biden looked old and disoriented during Thursday’s CNN debate with Donald Trump. He spoke in a quiet and hoarse voice, made some incoherent answers, and often stumbled over his own words.
It was a lackluster performance that played directly into Republican depictions of the 81-year-old president – the oldest president in American history — as too old and frail to serve another four years in office. Trump said as much during the debate.
“He’s not equipped to be president,” Trump said. “You know it and I know it.”
The debate was a highly personal affair between two men who made little effort during their nearly two hours on stage to contain their disdain for one another.
Biden called Donald Trump a “loser,” and a “whiner” with the “morals of an alley cat.” Trump accused Biden of turning the United States into a “third-world nation” and of being the “worst president in history by far, and everybody knows it.”
Trump turned in a spirited performance, hammering Biden on inflation and the immigration crisis under his watch. But Biden’s struggles seemed to be the major takeaway for CNN’s post-debate panel, which reported that senior Democrats are in an “aggressive panic” over their party leader’s apparent frailty.
Speaking about improvements he’s claiming at the border, Biden at one point seemed lost, saying: “I’m going to continue to move until we get the total ban on, the total initiative relative what we’re going to do with more border patrol and more asylum officers.”
“I don’t really know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump replied. “I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
At another point, Biden got visibly lost when talking about his plan to raise taxes on the wealthy to wipe out the debt, saying he wanted to make sure “that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with, with, with the Covid, excuse me, with dealing with everything we had to do with, look, we finally beat Medicare.”
“Well, he’s right,” Trump said, “he did beat Medicare. He beat it to death.”
He stammered. He stumbled. And, with fewer than five months to November, he played straight into Democrats’ worst fears — that he’s fumbling away this election to Donald Trump.
The alarm bells for Democrats started ringing the second Biden started speaking in a haltingly hoarse voice. Minutes into the debate, he struggled to mount an effective defense of the economy on his watch and flubbed the description of key health initiatives he’s made central to his reelection bid, saying “we finally beat Medicare” and incorrectly stating how much his administration lowered the price of insulin. He talked himself into a corner on Afghanistan, bringing up his administration’s botched withdrawal unprompted. He repeatedly mixed up “billion” and “million,” and found himself stuck for long stretches of the 90-minute debate playing defense.
And when he wasn’t speaking, he stood frozen behind his podium, mouth agape, his eyes wide and unblinking for long stretches of time.
“Biden is toast — calling it now,” said Jay Surdukowski, an attorney and Democratic activist from New Hampshire who co-chaired former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley’s 2016 presidential campaign in the state.
In text messages with POLITICO, Democrats expressed confusion and concern as they watched the first minutes of the event. One former Biden White House and campaign aide, granted anonymity to discuss the matter, called it “terrible,” adding that they have had to ask themselves over and over: “What did he just say? This is crazy.”
Sales of previously owned homes are sitting at a 30-year low and didn’t move much in May as prices hit a new record and mortgage rates remain high.
So-called existing home sales in May were essentially flat, down 0.7% from April to a seasonally adjusted, annualized rate of 4.11 million units, according to the National Association of Realtors, or NAR. Sales fell 2.8% from May of last year …
The median price of an existing home sold in May was $419,300, a record-high price in the Realtors’ recording and up 5.8% year over year. The gain was the strongest since October 2022. Prices gained in all regions.
The Realtors noted in a release that the mortgage payment for a typical home today is more than double what it was five years ago.
It’s almost as though the Biden Recession, constrained supply (a great deal from blue locale regulation that prevent housing from being built), and high interest rates mean that no one wants to buy or sell.
According to a new report, the average renter can’t afford a typical U.S. apartment.
According to Redfin, the typical U.S. renter household earns about $54,712 per year, which is 17.3% less than the $66,120 needed to afford the median-priced apartment at $1,653 per month. This means that 61% of renters can’t afford their housing without significant financial stress.
Snip.
Inflation, which has surged during Biden’s presidency, certainly exacerbates this issue. Rising costs for essentials like food, gas, and utilities leave renters with even less disposable income to cover their housing costs. Despite promises to address affordability and economic inequality, the Biden administration has doubled down with claims that inflation is going down and that wage growth has outpaced it — which isn’t true. Biden has made it more difficult for Americans to achieve financial stability.
Pixar (part of Disney) (175 people, 14% of the company, who must have been thrilled to get a pink slip and then see unwoke Inside Out 2 go on to be Disney’s biggest movie of the year)
The Supreme Court on Friday issued a ruling overturning the 1984 Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council case, striking down a previous decision that granted federal agencies immensely broad power to draw up regulations without congressional approval.
The Court ruled in both Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerce — two nearly identical cases — that regulatory agencies will no longer be able to fill in the blanks of vague legislation in 6-2 and 6-3 decisions, respectively. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recused herself from the first case because she sat on the federal appeals court that had previously heard the case.
In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that it is not the place of agencies to clarify ambiguous legislation.
“Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities,” he wrote. “Courts do. The Framers, as noted, anticipated that courts would often confront statutory ambiguities and expected that courts would resolve them by exercising independent legal judgment.”
Writing a concurrence, Justice Neil Gorsuch argued that the concept of Chevron deference “undermines” many of the principles on which the United States was founded.
“It precludes courts from exercising the judicial power vested in them by Article III to say what the law is,” he wrote. “It forces judges to abandon the best reading of the law in favor of views of those presently holding the reins of the Executive Branch. It requires judges to change, and change again, their interpretations of the law as and when the government demands.”
This is a huge blow to the unchecked administrative state and a key decision in helping reign in untrammeled executive regulatory power.
This looks like it will put a crimp in Biden’s amnesty plans: “SCOTUS rules 6-3 that there’s no constitutional guarantee for non-citizen spouses to be admitted to the US.”
Russia’s newest S-500 air defense system has been deployed to Crimea to defend against ATACMS strike. Result? It was destroyed by an ATACMS strike. “This is a big embarrassment for Russia, that its newest and best missile system has had its clock clean by 30-year-old missiles.”
“War crimes arrest warrants issued for top Russian officials. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued an arrest warrant for Russia’s former defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, and the chief of general staff, Valery Gerasimov.” It would make one hell of a Dog The Bounty Hunter episode…
Andrew Cuomo (D-isgrace) admits that the bogus Trump hush money kangaroo trial should never have been held. “If his name was not Donald Trump and if he wasn’t running for president. I’m the former AG in New York. I’m telling you, that case would have never been brought. And that’s what is offensive to people. And it should be!” Broken clock, twice a day.
Federal judges in Missouri and Kansas issued separate rulings on June 24 blocking key sections of the Biden administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) program, which is designed to lower student loan payments and forgive debts.
A new version of the program that would reduce payments and shorten maximum repayment periods was set to take effect in July.
U.S. District Judge Michael Crabtree for the District of Kansas ruled that the Republican states were likely to succeed in their claim that the department lacked explicit congressional authority to enact this portion of the program.
“Defendants have offered colorable, plausible interpretations of the Higher Education Act that could authorize the SAVE Plan, but those interpretations fall short of clear congressional authorization,” Judge Crabtree, who was appointed under President Barack Obama, wrote on Monday.
However, he declined to block the program entirely, expressing concerns about the practicality of reversing parts of the plan that had already been implemented. He also said that Republicans’ delay in filing their lawsuits undermined their arguments that there was an immediate need to halt the entire program.
In a separate decision on the same day, U.S. District Judge Judge John Ross for the Eastern District of Missouri, also a President Obama appointee, blocked the department from forgiving “any further loan[s]” under SAVE until he decides the full case. His order said that such actions would likely strip state loan operators of revenue.
Judge Ross also suggested that the SAVE program might have exceeded the authority of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and that Missouri would likely be harmed by the program.
Just imagine if a Republican judge got a chance to rule on it…
“Kenya Protesters Storm Parliament, Police Fire Live Rounds, After Lawmakers Unleash Eco-Austerity.” Seems like $2.7 billion in taxes to serve nebulous “green” goals is unpopular in a country where the per capita GDP is $2,099. Thanks, IMF…
And an attempted coup in Bolivia evidently failed. President Luis Arce is a bit of a socialist scumbag, so it remains to be seen if he intends to follow in Venezuela’s footsteps to economic ruin.
Not only are the massive crowds a problem, but this year the Saudi city is under an excessive heat warning, with highs at times having reached between 110 and 115°F during the day, and 100°F even at night. This has resulted in what could be a record amount of heat injuries and deaths by the pilgrimage season’s end. On Monday the Saudi weather service recorded a temperature of 125 degrees Fahrenheit at Mecca’s Grand Mosque.
Many of the dead were “unauthorized pilgrims” who hadn’t paid their Hajj fee. “This group was more vulnerable to the heat because, without official permits, they could not access air-conditioned spaces provided by Saudi authorities for the 1.8 million authorized pilgrims to cool down after hours of walking and praying outside.”
More accused perverts in classrooms. “Former Denton ISD Coach Arrested for Online Solicitation of a Minor. A mother from another school district says she tried to warn Denton ISD of an inappropriate encounter her daughter had with district employee Justin Wallace Carter.”
“A Uvalde County grand jury has indicted former school district police Chief Pete Arredondo and another former district officer on charges of child endangerment, the first criminal charges brought against law enforcement for the botched response to the deadliest school shooting in Texas history, the San Antonio Express-News reported. Arredondo and Adrian Gonzales face felony charges of abandoning or endangering a child.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
A fun edition of What’s My Line featuring America’s most decorated war hero.
Kinky Friedman, RIP. He was a Texas original, an entertaining musician, a successful author, and the last interesting Democrat in Texas. Dwight already posted “The Ballad of Charlie Whitman,” so I direct you over there. I have an inscribed (not to me) first of A Case of Lone Star, and I should probably read that next.
Biden inserts foot into mouth yet again, refuses to leave his basement for something as trivial as the DNC, embraces illegal alien amnesty, mumbles about China, plays footsie with more commies, and gives up on door-knocking. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Indeed, there’s not going to be any in-person DNC at all. Why would anyone watch an online streaming convention unless it’s their job? What’s the point if you can’t see the freaks in the funny hats?
On his website, former Vice President (and presumptive Democratic candidate for president) Joe Biden vows, if elected, to pass legislation “providing a roadmap to citizenship for nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants”. Last week, his old boss, former President Barack Obama, explained how Biden (or whoever controls him) will do it: by eliminating the filibuster.
Snip.
Obama believes that Biden will be elected, and that the Democrats will win a majority in the Senate in November, as the Wall Street Journal postulated on July 30. That will enable both to push for legislation that they want — like statehood for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. And amnesty for illegal aliens.
Each of these actions will solidify a Democratic majority into the foreseeable future, and give the party of Jackson the White House for as long.
Snip.
If the Democrats maintain control of the House, win the White House, and gain control of the Senate and end the filibuster, amnesty would be among the first bills that would be rammed through to signature in the 117th Congress, for that most basic (and base) of reasons: power.
Assuming that there are 10.5 million illegal aliens in the United States (a conservative estimate the Pew Research Center in June 2019 made of the population in 2017), and depending on the parameters of the amnesty, that would mean that there could be that many new voters (or more) in 2026.
Donald Trump’s campaign says it knocked on over 1 million doors in the past week alone.
Joe Biden’s campaign says it knocked on zero.
The Republican and Democratic parties — from the presidential candidates on down — are taking polar opposite approaches to door-to-door canvassing this fall. The competing bets on the value of face-to-face campaigning during a pandemic has no modern precedent, making it a potential wild card in November, especially in close races.
Biden and the Democratic National Committee aren’t sending volunteers or staffers to talk with voters at home, and don’t anticipate doing anything more than dropping off literature unless the crisis abates. The campaign and the Democratic National Committee think they can compensate for the lack of in-person canvassing with phone calls, texts, new forms of digital organizing, and virtual meet-ups with voters.
I don’t know how effective door-knocking is in 2020, but I do know that every other method listing is easy to ignore. I suspect that door-knocking and direct mail work better for casual voters than “virtual meetups,” mainly because a 1% chance of effectivity is better than a 0% chance.
Gertrude Stein once quipped of her native Oakland, California, “there is no there there.” Isn’t that how it is with Joe Biden? He doesn’t make gaffes; he is a gaffe, poor thing. (I’ve expatiated on this elsewhere.)
I suspect that most Americans, whatever side of the political aisle they occupy, do not really see Joe Biden—especially when, like Alice, they are looking directly at him. They need to manage a sidelong glance, a sudden shift of perspective to catch his drift (and I employ the word “drift” advisedly).
This was brought home to me by an article that appeared a few days ago in Le Figaro, the biggest newspaper in France. The headline summed up its burden: “La stupéfiante indulgence des grands médias américains envers Joe Biden”—“The stupefying indulgence of big American media towards Joe Biden.”
The author evinced no pro-Trump sympathies. On the contrary. Yet he wrote in amazement at the seamless media distortion that worked to disparage Trump while excusing Biden—a process that “va jusqu’à l’occultation des faits”—goes so far (add an expression of amazement) as to conceal the facts.
Description of plagiarizing Neil Kinnock snipped.
The article in Le Figaro notes that the American media has generally covered for Democrats while castigating Republicans. Just think of their worshipful treatment of JFK and demonization of Richard Nixon. (And the love affair with all things Kennedy reached back to JFK’s father—Hitler’s favorite U.S. ambassador—and forward to Teddy “Chappaquiddick” “waitress sandwich” Kennedy and beyond. And of course, the media positively fawned over Barack Obama while snarling endlessly at George W. Bush.
But there is something different and more extreme about the indulgence lavished upon Joe Biden and the obloquy heaped upon President Trump. Le Figaro quotes Joel Kotkin, an outspoken opponent of Trump’s, who nevertheless acknowledges he has “never seen a president treated the way he was. The effort to remove him was already being considered before he even set foot in the White House!”
Meanwhile, Joe Biden, endeavoring to ingratiate himself with black voters, claims that he was arrested by South African police while attempting to visit Nelson Mandela. But he wasn’t and he didn’t. “Invention,” Figaro notes, “du début à la fin.”
In brief, the difference in the treatment accorded to Trump and Biden is the difference between a bright daytime and a black night. . . . It amounts to a democratic scandal that is essentially Orwellian.
In one sense, the article in Le Figaro tells us nothing we didn’t already know. And yet it reveals a rift or fissure in The Narrative that is obvious to everyone outside the bubble, outside the echo chamber of American punditocracy. Joe Biden is toast. Already the polls, rigged though most of them are, are tightening. President Trump is calmly stealing the Democrats’ thunder, issuing executive orders on everything from payroll tax cuts to instituting a moratorium on evictions.
Coronavirus hysteria has, at least for now, prevented the president from deploying his biggest vote-getter, the huge rally. But he has adapted and is outflanking poor Biden on every front.
Remember: Hispanics are diverse, but black people are not:
Joe Biden says that “Unlike the African-American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community" pic.twitter.com/eSw8tU5fVQ
More on Biden’s black people aren’t diverse gaffe. “I think what happened is that Biden, in cognitive decline, is losing the ability to maintain the boundary between what is said behind the scenes with his advisers and what is appropriate for speech to the general public.”
More on the same subject:
From the media’s way of telling it, if Trump makes a racist statement, it’s proof he’s a racist. Case closed! But if Biden makes 10 racist statements, those are GAFFES. The implication is that Biden isn’t a racist, only a bungler. The guy just misspoke, again and again and again
The Biden/Sanders Unity Platform explicitly calls for defunding police agencies. Black Lives Matter leaders are demanding even more radical changes to the criminal justice system, and in an interview late last month, Biden responded “Absolutely” when he was asked if he would divert funds away from law enforcement.
Yet, just today, Biden said he supports additional funding for police. Perhaps it is a poll-driven statement as polls have repeatedly shown this is deeply unpopular.
Snip.
Now the Radical Communist Party (RCP) has endorsed Biden. They did it very carefully, saying Biden is still a terrible candidate, but he is the lesser of two evils. For them, he certainly is. Trump will stand up to the anarcho-communists in antifa and other groups. Biden’s inner circle sympathizes with their aims, and their allies are ascendant in the Democrat party.
Just today, another candidate supported by the Justice Democrats defeated an incumbent Democrat. Cori Bush, Ferguson Black Lives Matter leader, will join the other ideologues in the Squad when she wins in November. She defeated Lacy Clay, a black man whose father founded the Congressional Black Caucus. Clay supported Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, yet he wasn’t radical enough for new urban Democrats. She is the sixth socialist challenger to win a primary.
Remember that the Radical Communist Party was the group that had pre-printed signs ready to go for the Ferguson riots.
Spokespeople for Refuse Fascism include Carl Dix, a founding member of the RCP and Sunsara Taylor, another member of the RCP. The cutest thing about Taylor is that she also sits on the board of World Can’t Wait. This organization used the exact same language, accusations of bigotry and fascism, and calls to drive out the regime following the reelection of George W. Bush. And the same ridiculous logic to tie their batty ideas together.
It almost seems like the RCP pushes out these satellite groups that borrow the 501(c)(3) status from another organization to fund their riots and destruction every time Democrats lose an election. Refuse Fascism runs its donations through the Alliance for Global Justice (AfGJ). Its funders read like a who’s who of left-wing radicals from Tides to George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.
Financial industry cash flowing to Mr. Biden and outside groups supporting him shows him dramatically out-raising the president, with $44 million compared with Mr. Trump’s $9 million.
Last month, multiple Wall Street bundlers, including Alan Leventhal, the chief executive of Beacon Capital; Nat Simons, who runs a clean-tech investment fund; and Mr. Gray, Blackstone’s president, held virtual fund-raisers for Mr. Biden. The giving has been so robust that the Biden campaign is now asking for at least $1 million in donations before it will confirm the former vice president’s attendance at an event, say bundlers.
As the checks roll in, the Biden campaign has been carefully cultivating its relationship with the business community, with a focus on Wall Street. The outreach has included offering private briefings ahead of major policy rollouts and dangling various donor packages for the upcoming, and mostly virtual, Democratic National Convention.
I guess Democrats think the 1% is cool now that the real class enemy is working class cops…
Does he even mean WHO here, or did he mean the WTO?
Speaking of China:
#China is interfering in our election with almost all of its effort directed at unseating Prez #Trump. In this cycle, Beijing will do far more than any other foreign power has ever done, and that includes #Russia. #Biden
I heard someone describe whoever Biden picks for VP as his “living will”. That’s as good a description as any. (Biden would be older on his first day in office than Ronald Reagan, our oldest president, was on his last.)
The “final” Biden veep pick “rankings“: Harris, Rice, Whitmer, Duckworth, Bass. I don’t know any pundit that doesn’t think Biden is going to pick a black woman.
Biden leans on bundling billionaires, Steyer hits diminishing returns, Bloomberg takes up the “Most Widely Loathed” spot, Warren donations take a nosedive, Sanders commies, and Beto’s acid trip ends. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
We’re also down to the last two days of the year, so expect Q4 fundraising numbers to start dropping later this week.
Keep an eye on the new faces, I sagely advised: Sens. Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, plus former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas.
Sorry about that. Despite a fawning cover story in Vanity Fair, O’Rourke flamed out fast. Harris staged an impressive launch, but then fell to earth. Brown never entered the race. Only Booker is still running, and his campaign is on life support.
Next time I recommend a hot technology stock or a soon-to-be-famous restaurant, ignore the tip.
Snip.
I didn’t see Pete Buttigieg coming. The 37-year-old gay mayor of a small city? Inconceivable, I thought. Iowa voters may shortly prove me wrong.
I did see Elizabeth Warren coming. Her focus on plans to make the economy work better for the middle class was effective, I wrote.
Then Warren stumbled on healthcare. When she belatedly offered a plan, it proposed a government-run health insurance system, but only after a long transition period.
That seemed smart, I wrote. It’s not clear that voters agree.
To be fair, I did get some things right.
I figured out that the controversies over Biden’s verbal gaffes were really a polite proxy for questions about his age. He’ll be 78 on Inauguration Day; is he up to the job?
I noted that most Democratic voters aren’t Bernie Sanders-style socialists, and that the progressive “litmus tests” that dominated early months of the campaign — “Medicare for all,” the Green New Deal, and abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — weren’t a sure path to winning primaries.
Speaking of which, unions, they of the fat health benefits, are not wild about “Medicare for All.” It would be tough going from a Cadillac plan to the equivalent of Medicaid.
Ranking the campaign dropouts. This is a pretty crappy “Have you done the will of the party, comrade?” ranking. No way does Kamala Harris’ disasterous campaign rank at the top.
Joe Biden released the names of more than 200 people and couples who are raising money for his presidential campaign, a list that includes a number of big names in Democratic money like Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg and LGBT rights activist Tim Gill and his husband, Scott Miller.
Biden’s list of fundraisers, each of which has brought in at least $25,000 for his presidential bid, includes many of the biggest names in Democratic fundraising. The list spans Wall Street, Silicon Valley and a number of politicians themselves.
The former vice president voluntarily disclosed the list as the Democratic field — and especially Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren — sparred with each other throughout November and December over how to have adequate transparency about money and finances on the campaign trail.
More than any other leading candidate, Biden is relying on big fundraising events to power his bid for the presidency, which makes these bundlers crucial to his success. Other big-name bundlers for Biden include New York venture capital and private equity investor Alan Patricof, and billionaire real estate broker George Marcus.
Biden is running for president on his longtime experience in public service, and his list of bundlers reflects the many high-powered connections he built over that time. Biden bundlers include current senators Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey and Delaware Sen. Chris Coons. Former White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles is a bundler for Biden, as is Dorothy McAuliffe, wife of former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
A number of former ambassadors — who are often longtime bundlers and major political donors in their own right — are also helping Biden. They include Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, former U.S. Ambassador to Portugal; Denise Bauer, former U.S. Ambassador to Belgium; Anthony Gardner, former U.S. Ambassador to the European Union; and Mark Gilbert, former U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand, and more.
It occurs to me that if there were a massive foreign aid kickback scheme funneling overseas money to longtime swamp creatures, Belgium and EU ambassadors would be perfectly situated to direct/skim off the graft. Evidently Biden and Rudy Giuliani have been have been feuding since the 1980s. (Worth reading for the many flip-flops in Biden’s career, including on the death penalty.) Remember how Biden is supposed to be the moderate, rational one?
More Hunter Biden dirt? Eh, it’s from a private investigator in the baby momma lawsuit, so caution is probably in order. But the “helping defraud American Indians” charge is new, though the names of Devon Archer, John Galanis and Bevan Cooney are not. Heh:
Just saw the new Star Wars. Wow! Never saw this coming, Rey turned out to be Hunter Biden’s kid! What a twist!
Hillary Clinton tried. So did 16 rival Republicans. And after hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on ads attacking Donald Trump in 2016, the results were the same: They never did much damage.
Now Michael R. Bloomberg is trying — his way — spending millions each week in an online advertising onslaught that is guided by polling and data that he and his advisers believe provide unique insight into the president’s vulnerabilities.
The effort, which is targeting seven battleground states where polls show Mr. Trump is likely to be competitive in November, is just one piece of an advertising campaign that is unrivaled in scope and scale. On Facebook and Google alone, where Mr. Bloomberg is most focused on attacking the president, he has spent $18 million on ads over the last month, according to Acronym, a digital messaging firm that works with Democrats.
That is on top of the $128 million the Bloomberg campaign has spent on television ads, according to Advertising Analytics, an independent firm, which projects that Mr. Bloomberg is likely to spend a combined $300 million to $400 million on advertising across all media before the Super Tuesday primaries in early March.
Those amounts dwarf the ad budgets of his rivals, and he is spending at a faster clip than past presidential campaigns as well. Mr. Bloomberg is also already spending more than the Trump campaign each week to reach voters online. And if the $400 million estimate holds, that would be about the same as what President Barack Obama’s campaign spent on advertising over the course of the entire general election in 2012.
The ads amount to a huge bet by the Bloomberg campaign that there are enough Americans who are not too fixed in their opinions of Mr. Trump and can be swayed by the ads’ indictment of his conduct and character.
None of these assumptions are safe in a political environment that is increasingly bifurcated along partisan lines and where, for many voters, information from “the other side” is instantly suspect. But Mr. Bloomberg’s aides believe it is imperative to flood voters with attacks on the president before it is too late.
Yeah, let’s keep throwing money into a proven losing strategy. Can’t see how that one can possibly fail to beat Trump. And as long as we’re rerunning 2016’s Greatest Misses, have you tried expressing outrage over the Billy Bush tape? Bloomy is also dropping a ton of money on Texas for Super Tuesday:
Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is ramping up his efforts in Texas, with plans to build a state operation that his campaign says will be unrivaled by anyone else in the primary field.
In an announcement first shared with The Texas Tribune, his campaign said it will open a Texas headquarters in Houston and 16 field offices throughout the rest of the state between now and the March 3 primary. The offices will be spread across the Houston area, the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Austin, East Texas, the San Antonio area, El Paso, Laredo, McAllen and the Killeen area.
The campaign also named its first Texas hires:
Carla Brailey, vice chair of the Texas Democratic Party, will serve as Bloomberg’s senior advisor.
Ashlea Turner, a government relations consultant who worked on Bill White’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign, will serve as Bloomberg’s state director.
Kevin Lo, who worked on presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ Iowa campaign before she ended her campaign earlier this month, will serve as Bloomberg’s organizing director. (Update: On March 27, 2020, Texas Tribune sent out this correction via email: “*Editor’s note: Bloomberg’s campaign initially listed Kevin Lo as one of its first Texas hires. Lo later said he was incorrectly listed by the campaign and never worked for the campaign and has asked this story to be updated to remove his name.”)
Lizzie Lewis, communications director for 2018 gubernatorial nominee Lupe Valdez, will be Bloomberg’s press secretary.
Has anyone there ever run a successful campaign? None of the ones named were. Also:
While he’s only announced one hire, Biden has topped most Texas polls. There have not been many polls since Bloomberg declared his candidacy and launched a massive national TV ad blitz that prominently targeted the state. The one Texas survey since Bloomberg’s launch, released Dec. 11 by CNN, found Bloomberg at 5% — good enough for fifth place in but still far behind Biden, who placed a distant first with 35%.
Amy Keiderling is exactly who Cory Booker’s presidential campaign is looking for as he seeks to build momentum in the final weeks before the Iowa caucuses.
The Waukee small business owner listened to Booker’s remarks in an Adel bowling alley recently — Booker’s first stop of a four-day bus tour across Iowa. She said he gives her the same feeling she had when she caucused for Barack Obama.
He’s the first candidate she’s seen in person this cycle, but before she left, she committed to caucus for the U.S. senator from New Jersey.
She isn’t alone. Tess Seger, a campaign spokeswoman, said Booker surpassed his 10% average of caucus commitments at each of his tour stops. Sometimes 20% or 30% of the crowd signed the commitment cards.
“We’re getting the people who are going to be caucusing for us, precinct captaining for us,” Booker told the Register on Monday. “It’s really exciting. This is how you win here.”
But, so far, Booker is a far short from the winner’s circle. In the latest Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Poll, conducted in November by Selzer & Co., Booker earned 3% support among likely Democratic caucusgoers. He’s been at or below 4% in first choice preferences in the Iowa Poll since 2018.
One cruel explanation is that people are simply lying to the Booker campaign because Democrats don’t have the heart to turn down a black candidate. Alternately, his “10% of tour stops” simply isn’t translating into mass appeal. Another theory: People actually do like him, but no one thinks he’s tough enough to beat Trump. And if you haven’t already had your fill, here’s another “struggles for traction” piece.
Downtown underwent a dramatic transformation under Buttigieg’s leadership. One-way streets became two-way. Speed limits were reduced. Driving lanes were narrowed. Trees were planted. Decorative brick pavers were laid.
I hate him already.
Buttigieg and his supporters say the more pedestrian-friendly downtown has spurred more than $190 million in private investment, as several key buildings found new life, transformed into hotels, apartments and restaurants.
As the economy recovered from the recession of 2008-’09, some of that investment might have been inevitable, as Buttigieg benefited from a rebounding national economy. Supporters still credit the mayor for setting the tone and aggressively pursuing projects.
More than 500 apartments have been built or are under construction downtown, luring new residents to the city.
That’s, what, two whole complexes?
The street changes have also annoyed some motorists. Any news story about Smart Streets that’s shared on social media will draw complaints from residents pointing out there is too much traffic congestion downtown at peak travel times. Buttigieg has said the slowed traffic is worth the larger benefits.
There’s no end to Democrats willing to make life worse for people who drive cars.
There’s also Smart Streets’ roughly $21 million price tag, paid for with bonds that are being repaid with Tax Incremental Financing money, which comes from property taxes paid on the assessed valuation growth in an area. That project, combined with the city’s overhaul of its parks system, means the city could be limited in making other big investments in the near future, depending on their size.
Still, the assessed value of downtown property rose from about $132.8 million in 2013 to roughly $160.9 million last year, a 21-percent increase, according to a Tribune analysis of county property tax records.
Whole things sounds like a mixed bag at best. But since there are no reports of him luring an entire population of drug-addicted beggars to South Bend, it does sound like he did a much better job as a mayor than Steve Adler…
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Headline: “Julian Castro sees lift in polls despite being knocked off debate stage.” Reality: He’s up to 4%. Break out the party favors!
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? “Michael Moore: Trump Will Win in 2020 if Democrats Nominate Another ’Centrist, Moderate’ like Hillary Clinton.” I understand all those words individually…
2. He’s criticized “Medicare for all” a lot. What is his health care plan?
He wants to keep Medicare for people over 65 and create a new government program for people under 65. Everyone under 65 would automatically be enrolled in that program — which would cover all “essential health benefits,” including pre-existing conditions — but people could choose to forfeit the coverage and receive a credit to buy private insurance instead. He argues that this would guarantee universal coverage without forcing people to use a government health plan.
So instead of an expensive, unworkable program, he offers a slightly-less-insane unworkable but expensive program.
Sanders claims to be a democratic socialist in the European mold; an admirer of Sweden and Denmark. Yet his career is pockmarked with praise for regimes considerably to the left of those Scandinavian models. He has praised Cuba for “making enormous progress in improving the lives of poor and working people.” In his memoir, he bragged about attending a 1985 parade celebrating the Sandinistas’ seizure of power six years before. “Believe it or not,” he wrote, “I was the highest ranking American official there.” At the time, the Sandinista regime had already allied with Cuba and begun a large military buildup courtesy of the Soviet Union. The Sandinistas, Mr. Sanders had every reason to know, had censored independent news outlets, nationalized half of the nation’s industry, forcibly displaced the Misquito Indians, and formed “neighborhood watch” committees on the Cuban model. Sandinista forces, like those in East Germany and other communist countries, regularly opened fire on those attempting to flee the country. None of that appears to have dampened Sanders’s enthusiasm. The then-mayor of Burlington, Vt., gushed that under his leadership, “Vermont could set an example to the rest of the nation similar to the type of example Nicaragua is setting for the rest of Latin America.”
Sanders was impatient with those who found fault with the Nicaraguan regime:
Is [the Sandinistas’] crime that they have built new health clinics, schools, and distributed land to the peasants? Is their crime that they have given equal rights to women? Or that they are moving forward to wipe out illiteracy? No, their crime in Mr. Reagan’s eyes and the eyes of corporations and billionaires that determine American foreign policy is that they have refused to be a puppet and banana republic to American corporate interests.
Sanders now calls for a revolution in this country, and we’re all expected to nod knowingly. Of course he means a peaceful, democratic revolution. It would be outrageous to suggest anything else. Well, it would not be possible for Bernie Sanders to usher in a revolution in the U.S., but his sympathy for the real thing is notable. As Michael Moynihan reported, in the case of the Sandinistas, he was willing to justify press censorship and even bread lines. The regime’s crackdown on the largest independent newspaper, La Prensa, “makes sense to me” Sanders explained, because the country was besieged by counterrevolutionary forces funded by the United States. As for bread lines, which soon appeared in Nicaragua as they would decades later in Venezuela, Sanders scoffed: “It’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, that people are lining up for food. That is a good thing! In other countries people don’t line up for food. The rich get the food and the poor starve to death.”
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. All the vaguely interesting Steyer news is also vaguely off target. First: “AOC accepted Tom Steyer contribution, despite accusing Buttigieg of ‘being funded by billionaires.'” (thisismyshockedface.jpg) Second: “Former Tom Steyer aide sues SC Democratic Party for alleged defamation.” Details: “A former aide for 2020 presidential candidate Tom Steyer who resigned amid allegations that he stole volunteer data from the rival Kamala Harris campaign is now suing the South Carolina Democratic Party, accusing the party’s chairman of defamation.” Being a former Tom Steyer aide must be like getting cut from the Washington Generals.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Elizabeth Warren’s campaign sounds the alarm as fundraising pace slows about 30% in fourth quarter.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign told supporters in an email on Friday that, so far, it has raised just over $17 million in the fourth quarter, a significant drop from her fundraising haul during the third quarter.
The memo asks backers to step up in giving to the campaign.
“So far this quarter, we’ve raised a little over $17 million. That’s a good chunk behind where we were at this time last quarter,” it says.
Warren finished the third quarter bringing in $24.6 million, which was much more than most of the other Democratic primary contenders, including former Vice President Joe Biden and Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Sen. Bernie Sanders – who, like Warren, shuns big-money fundraisers – led the field with more than $25 million during the third quarter.
If the $17 million total stands that would represent a 30% drop from the previous quarter. The quarter ends in four days.
Poll numbers and fawning media profiles are ephemeral, but cold, hard cash is a great measuring stick for a presidential campaign. Warren is in trouble and donors know it. After all that noise about the most women ever in a presidential field, it seems increasingly likely that it’s going to come down to Biden and Sanders. Warren had no problem taking high dollar donations until she ran for President. If you live in Iowa, own a phone and vote Democrat, there’s a decent chance Warren will call you:
Makes sure that activists, celebrities, elected leaders and local Democratic officials keep picking up the phone (or checking their voice mail) to hear the same five words: “Hi, this is Elizabeth Warren.”
She has made thousands of such calls over the past two years to key political leaders and influencers, according to her campaign, and Democratic officials say she stands apart for her prolific phone habit. She makes her case against President Trump, seeks out advice and tries to lock down endorsements.
It is a huge investment of the campaign’s most precious resource — Ms. Warren’s time — that advisers hope will pay a crucial good-will dividend in the run-up to the first votes of 2020.
The breadth of her call list serves another purpose: It reinforces the campaign’s message that she is a team player for the party, looking to lift candidates up and down the ballot despite running as a populist outsider threatening to shake up the system. And her efforts as a party builder and leader differentiate her from a key rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, who represents Vermont as an independent rather than as a Democrat, and whom far fewer Democrats described calling them out of the blue.
Early this year, Ms. Warren announced that she would not be courting or calling big donors, a fact that has become central to her campaign. “I don’t do call time with millionaires and billionaires,” she declared at the most recent debate. Ms. Warren instead uses her calls to small donors — heavily publicized and advertised on social media — to burnish her populist credentials, and these less talked-about political calls to woo the establishment.
Ms. Warren occasionally makes the calls on the long walks she takes in the morning — she likes to get her steps in and can sometimes be seen, sans entourage, briskly roaming the streets of whatever city she woke up in that day. But most often her calls are made in car rides in between events.
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Yet another NYTthree questions piece. “Power of love” question is vapid, and reparations is idiot Social justice Warrior pandering. On the third question, on her views on mental health, she “believes that antidepressants are harmfully overprescribed.” She probably has a point.
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
The next debates loom, Gabbard sues Google, Moulton shoots people in a graveyard, billionaire Steyer begs for pennies, a lot of polls, and your periodic reminder that polls are useless.
It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
Also, consider this advanced notice that you’re not going to get nearly as lengthy a Clown Car Update next Monday, as Armadillocon and work-related duties are going to be soaking up an inordinate amount of my time late this week and early next.
Monmouth (South Carolina): Biden 39, Harris 12, Sanders 10, Warren 9, Buttigieg 5, Booker 2, Steyer 2, Bennet 1, O’Rourke 1, Klobuchar 1. “Biden has widespread support among black voters (51%), a group that makes up more than 6-in-10 likely primary voters. His support among white voters (24%) is less than half that level. Among the top five candidates, two earn significantly higher support among white voters than black voters: Warren (21% white and 2% black) and Buttigieg (11% white and 1% black). The remaining candidates draw equal support from both groups: Harris (12% white and 12% black) and Sanders (10% white and 10% black).” Those are disasterous numbers for Harris and Booker, who were game-planning for a South Carolina boost.
With the second round of debates looming this week, a whole lot of candidates seem to be angling for a “Kill Biden” strategy. Understandable, but not sufficient, and one wonders how many lines of attack will rehash the culture wars clashes of the last half century (crime, busing, etc.) that Democrats lost the first time around.
Exactly twelve years ago, on July 29, 2007, national opinion polls declared the front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination to be one Rudolph Giuliani, the bombastic former New York City mayor. In second place, seven points back, was a retired Tennessee senator and actor, Fred Thompson. Languishing in third place, another five points behind, was the eventual G.O.P. nominee, John McCain. Over on the Democratic side, on the same date, Hillary Clinton led Barack Obama by nearly thirteen points. Everyone knows how that turned out.
Twenty Democratic candidates are set to debate in Detroit this week, as countless Democratic voters wonder, with knotted stomachs, whether anyone will emerge to defeat Donald Trump, in November, 2020. So what do the early polls tell us? I asked around and found an array of specialists firm in their beliefs that the polls are iffy. “These numbers are fun, but I wouldn’t put money on anything,” Lydia Saad, a senior Gallup research director, told me. “Historically, among Democrats, if you had to bet at this point, you’d do a better job betting against, than for, the front-runner.” Which can’t be good news for Joe Biden, who is ahead but who slipped after his shaky debate performance, last month.
Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager in 2012, didn’t mince words: “Right now, it’s just too bumpy. There are too many candidates. There’s too much back-and-forth. ‘Oh, the polling shows Joe Biden is the best candidate to win the election.’ And then, after the first debate, ‘Oh, Kamala Harris came up, and she can win.’ And all of it is just bullshit.” At this stage, he said, polls can offer indications of what might happen, but he wouldn’t take them to the bank. One problem is that so little is known about so many of the Democratic candidates. Another is that so few people are paying close attention. And then there is the fact that a Presidential campaign is a bruising, billion-dollar proving ground. No candidate sails to victory untested and unscathed.
“Inside the Democrats’ Podcast Presidential Primary, Where Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang Rule.” Biden comes in third, but evidently because he has his own podcast. Or maybe “had,” since the last one seems to be dated October 23, 2018. It seems to be just some guy (not Biden) reading political news stories. It’s super-boring.
CNN did a “power ranking” of the top 10 Democratic contenders where they ranked Harris second, because of course they did.
Washington Post‘s The Fix did one that’s even stupider, with Warren first, Harris second, and Biden sixth. Yang and Williamson aren’t on it, but Kirsten “dead in the water” Gillibrand is. It’s naked gamesmanship disguised as analysis.
Speaking of which, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog takes on the field. Most of it is pretty lame, but there was this: “Kristen is the candidate for everyone who would say, ‘I love Hillary Clinton but she’s just too likable.'”
Rolling Stonedoes the ranking thing as well, but it much more closely tracks polls, going Biden-Warren-Harris-Sanders-Buttigieg. Has Yang too low and Messam over Sestak down at the bottom of the list.
Now on to the clown car itself:
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? She told her usual voter suppression fairy tales to the NAACP, who I’m sure lapped it up. Eh. I’m going to give her two weeks to give any indication she’s running, and if not I’m going to move her to the “not running” list.
The political calculation driving Biden’s campaign — and the main reason he has been assumed by many to be the most electable Democrat — is the belief that the Scranton native can win back enough of those voters to carry Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and deny Trump a second term. “The issues that are front and center now,” he told me, “are issues that have been in my wheelhouse for a long time,” citing what he said was his advocacy on behalf of the middle class. Some who voted for Trump, he went on, were starting to realize that Trump’s tax cuts were tailored for the wealthy and for corporations; to take note of his unceasing effort to dismantle Obamacare; to grasp that he was a false tribune of the forgotten man. “When the carnival comes through town the first time, and the guy with the shell and the pea game, and you lose — the second time they come around, you’re a little more ‘Wait, wait, wait, wait, I saw what happened last time,’ ” he said. Trump voters might be unwilling to admit out loud to buyer’s remorse, he allowed. “They don’t want to turn to their buddy and say, ‘I’m taking off my Make America Great Again [hat].’ ” But Trump’s base, he argued, isn’t as solid as it appears: “Not all of them, but I think they’re persuadable, yes.”
Biden and his advisers are convinced that the general election will mostly be a referendum on Trump and his fitness for office. “This is really about character and values as opposed to issues and ideology,” says Mike Donilon, Biden’s chief strategist. He acknowledges that Hillary Clinton tried and failed to make Trump’s suitability the pivotal question of the 2016 election. The difference this time, he says, is that Trump is now president and has demonstrated his inadequacy. Biden made a similar point. “Even when he was running,” Biden told me, “I don’t think anybody thought he would be as bad as he is.”
Orange man bad! Note that he’s not trying to run on “this lousy economy.” Biden loves him some ObamaCare. Huh: “Harris’s close friendship with Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015 at age 46, is giving an unusually personal tone to the growing rivalry between Biden and Harris (D-Calif.), which will be on display again at Wednesday’s debate.”
Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown says he doesn’t think Biden will be the nominee, and makes noises about getting in himself, because if there’s anything this field needs, it’s one more guy running. (Also see the entry on Steyer below.)
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Plans to go after Biden in the debates. Also says he’s near the 130,000 donor threshold for the next round of debates. The Chicago Tribune says he’s foolish to go after Biden for the 1994 crime bill. “Americans were keenly aware of the growing danger, and they wanted something done about it — whatever it took to make them safer.” And a lot of people calling for harsher penalties were black Democratic politicians.
“My name is Steve, and I work for the state.” That is not the voice of a Democrat who wants to do away with the private health insurance of more than half the population. It is the voice of a Democrat who would go on to expand Medicaid coverage — twice — in a blood red state with a Republican majority legislature, a Democrat committed to keeping rural hospitals open, which probably only matters to people who don’t plan their heart attacks two hours ahead.
His is also not the voice of free college or canceling student debt. It is the voice of a Democrat who has shepherded several tuition freezes for residents at the state universities, thereby minimizing the need for loans in the first place. He also beefed up the Montana Registered Apprenticeship Program, a public-private partnership among the state and tribal colleges and more than 500 businesses whose graduates earn $20,000 more than the state average. In Montana, that’s a year’s mortgage, about three years of a kid’s tuition at one of the aforementioned state schools, 1,700 movie tickets — that’s a life.
Does Mr. Bullock, with his modest but concrete progress in a state hostile to Democrats on issues all Democrats hold dear, sound boring compared to charismatic candidates promising revolutionary change? I don’t know. Is winning boring?
Like some leftist Dr. Dolittle, Mr. Bullock has a talent for knowing how to talk Republicans into doing Democratic things (including voting for him). It resulted in his re-election in 2016 in a state President Trump won by over 20 points. His crafty approach involves good manners, logic and a willingness to compromise when he can (and veto when he won’t). He sees the good in Republicans because there is good to be seen: Several of the conservative legislators who voted to support the public universities attended them.
Sounds like the sort of incremental approach the loudest voices in the Democratic base assure us is passe compared to radical change. He gets a Politico profile. “He thinks Democrats are not doing enough to win over voters who backed Obama and Trump.” Also slammed Warren’s claims of PAC purity. “Everybody can be pure if you transfer over $8 or 10 million from their Senate accounts directly.” Bullock also opposes impeachment.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Has a plan for homesteading vacant property. Not necessarily a bad idea in abstract, but his plan actual sounds like what it will be is the fed airdrops money, the connected scoop up desirable property cheap, and after a year you’ll find that we’ve spent $500 million and created a new federal bureaucracy to actual give 37 homeless people homes. (It doesn’t say that, but I’m pretty sure that’s what it will actually amount to.) “South Bend Cops Warn of ‘Mass Exodus’ as Morale Plummets Over Buttigieg’s Mishandling of Shooting.” Lil Nas X: “No ‘Old Town Road for you!”
(Found the oldest version of this meme to represent the age of the idea.) Now if he wanted to limit it to everyone receiving federal welfare payments, that I could get behind…
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Harris’ post-debate bounce is fading, which you could have learned here, what, three weeks ago? Flip, meet flop. “Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., backtracked on her support for decriminalizing illegal border crossing, then immediately reversed course and said she was in favor of it.” If you like your insurance plan, you can suck it up while government moves you to socialized medicine, but she promises to let insurance companies run parts of it. New York Times wonders what she actually believes:
For the fights she has promised to wage, Ms. Harris prizes two weapons above all: presidential decrees and federal dollars. They are the instruments of an impatient politician — a career prosecutor sensitive to how slow the machinery of government can move, and how unforgiving voters can be.
Ms. Harris’s economic agenda involves trillions of dollars in new spending — exact estimates vary, but well over $3 trillion and perhaps more than $4 trillion — with much of it aimed at distributing cash to people in economic distress. Most of the spending takes the form of a refundable tax credit for low- and middle-income taxpayers.
But it also includes hundreds of billions of dollars earmarked for specific purposes: raises for public schoolteachers, tax benefits for people who rent their homes and grants for minority home buyers. On Friday, Ms. Harris’s campaign announced a $75 billion initiative to invest in minority-owned businesses and historically black colleges.
Snip.
Of nearly a dozen major plans Ms. Harris has announced, about a third have also included a kind of a threat: that if Congress did not resolve an issue with sufficient haste, she would take narrower steps with unilateral presidential authority.
Those steps, according to Ms. Harris’s campaign, would bestow new protections on undocumented immigrants, impose new limits on firearm sales, enable the manufacture of cheaper pharmaceuticals and require federal contractors to meet pay-equity standards for women. Together, these plans convey a stark skepticism that Congress can be counted upon to pass important laws — skepticism that other Democratic self-styled pragmatists, like Mr. Biden, do not share.
The decrees she has drafted are a statement, too, of Ms. Harris’s confidence in her own authority as an executor of the law.
That role, Ms. Harris said in the interview, “is my comfortable place.”
Her pitch seems to be “put me in charge so I can spend all the money and rule by decree.”
All happy campaigns are alike; each flailing campaign flails in its own way. And Mr. Hickenlooper’s disappointment runs deeper than most of his peers’. It is easy to imagine him succeeding in a past cycle, as a popular, moderate two-term executive of a purple state, known for brokering deals on environmental issues and gun regulation. He has arrived instead at a moment of celebri-fied elections and simmering progressive opposition to Mr. Trump.
Nowhere is the disconnect more visceral for a long shot than in the rented reception halls in early-voting states across the country. Eyes migrate to the carpet patterns. Campaign stickers sit unstuck. Volunteer sign-up sheets remain wrenchingly white. It is the difference between polite applause and spontaneous affection, abiding a handshake and demanding a selfie. It is the difference between a former governor and a future president.
“I somehow don’t feel he’s got the punch,” said Rachel Rosenblum, 82, of Danbury, N.H., leaving the Hanover event a few minutes early.
A woman nearby noticed the small gathering through a window and approached Ms. Rosenblum, curious to know who had reserved the space. “Is that a private event?” she asked.
“No,” Ms. Rosenblum replied. “He wants to win the election.”
Other indignities have been more public. Before the first Democratic debate in Miami, a security guard mistook Mr. Hickenlooper for a reporter. In an appearance on “The View” last week, a host, Ana Navarro, confused him with Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington. “All white people look alike, apparently,” a co-host, Joy Behar, said.
It is a particularly humbling comedown for a man who, just a few years ago, garnered reasonably serious consideration to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate — and who retains outsize status in Colorado as the spindly brewpub owner who made it big.
I imagine that we’ll get lots more “failure to launch” pieces between now and Iowa. He has a plan for rural broadband and development, that may well appeal to all six of the rural Democrats still left in the party.
In May, Inslee signed into law the nation’s first public option, set to go live next fall. Under the plan, the Inslee administration will contract with a private insurer to sell coverage on the state’s Affordable Care Act exchange. The state projects that premiums in the public plan will be 5 to 10 percent cheaper that alternatives because of capped payments to doctors and hospitals. That might not translate into a major enrollment boost, and it remains to be seen whether enough providers will participate in the plan.
Inslee also signed legislation making Washington the first state to add a guaranteed long-term care benefit, addressing a growing challenge for an aging population. The law, which in concept is similar to Social Security, creates a payroll tax to offer a $100-per-day allowance for nursing home care, in-home assistance or another community-based option. It’s not enough to fully fund nursing home care, which can top $100,000 per year, but it may ease some financial pressure on families.
So he favors plans structured like ObamaCare that will no doubt fail like ObamaCare. (See also: “death spiral.”) He has a New York Times op-ed on climate change, just in case you’re out of melatonin.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. “The presidential campaign of Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar has been accused of delaying staff pay in order to boost the campaign’s cash-on-hand figures at reporting time.” That piece mentions a $55,000 a day burn rate. Since she brought in only $2.9 million in Q2, that burn rate is not sustainable, and that senate transfer money will only last so long. She has a “housing plan” described as “sweeping in scope but scant on details.” File it with Hickenlooper’s rural broadband plan…
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Not only is there no news for him, but I can’t even get his website to come up right now…
On his second combat tour in Iraq, 2nd Lt. Seth Moulton led his platoon in one of the most grueling battles of the war, at a cemetery in Najaf.
“It was intense,” says Nick Henry, who served as a lance corporal under Moulton. “The thing we dealt with in the cemetery was a lot like Vietnam, almost. The insurgency would dig into the cemetery and they would pop out of little tunnels and holes. We would fight through them and then they would end up popping out of tunnels behind us, and we’d have to back up and re-clear, and basically it was 360 all the time.”
Moulton served four tours of combat in Iraq. He’s called it the most influential experience of his life, one he refers to often in his presidential run.
Interviews with those who served with Moulton in Iraq reveal that one quality that has sometimes gotten him in trouble in politics — his ambition — served him well in combat.
Henry says half the men in their platoon saw combat for the first time in the battle of Najaf. He says Moulton was a “very intelligent” platoon commander, sometimes “a little too intelligent,” in the sense that he sometimes tried to implement tactics that were more advanced than entry-level Marines were capable of.
Still, Henry says, everything was relatively well executed. He describes Moulton as always involved, with good command and control in a chaotic situation, someone who would lead from the front most of the time, and not overly controlling.
Henry calls Moulton one of the better platoon commanders he had in five combat deployments.
“He’s very sincere with his caring,” Henry says, and that came across most vitally when Moulton made sure his men were ready for combat. “He spent the time to come up with the plans and the training plan to make sure that we were prepared for anything that we came to, which is, in my personal belief, why our platoon was the most heavily relied on to execute missions during the battle of Najaf.”
Snip.
As measured by the Democratic National Committee, he’s not doing well. The DNC has barred him from two rounds of debates because he has yet to get the required number of financial donors or standing in the polls.
“It’s the longest of long shots,” says Gergen, who believes Moulton has alienated some on the left, ironically because last year, he campaigned successfully to get young Democratic veterans elected to Congress, an effort Gergen says contributed to the Democrats taking back the House of Representatives.
“The people who won were taking back districts that [President] Trump had won in many cases,” he says, “and so naturally, they have to be more mainstream than some of the progressives in the Democratic Party, and that makes Seth a target for some of the progressives, saying he’s too mainstream, he’s too close to the center.”
The Iraq stuff is a whole lot more interesting than the political stuff. He’s for impeachment. He filed a digital privacy bill. “The Automatic Listening and Exploitation Act, or the ALEXA Act for short, would empower the Federal Trade Commission to seek immediate penalties if a smart device is found to have recorded user conversations without the device’s wake word being triggered… Moulton said that he would like to see his legislation spur a greater tech debate within the halls of Congress.” Uh…you’ve got a real issue there, Moulton, but the purpose of legislation is to make the laws of the land, not “spur debate.”
O’Rourke’s second-quarter fundraising total, announced two weeks ago, started to cement the sense of flop from polls that had him down to 1 or 2 percent, after being in third place when he announced in March he was running. He raised $3.6 million from April through June, meaning that after raising a blowout $6.1 million in his first 24 hours in the race, he picked up just $6.9 million in the three and a half months that followed. O’Rourke and his aides know how much is riding on the second debate next week, but they’re also struggling with what to do: He became a national name partly based on a viral video of him defending Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling during the national anthem. Re-creating that in a rapid-fire, multi-podium debate is pretty much impossible.
Plus, he has to compete directly with South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, whom he’ll share the stage with for the first time on Tuesday night. Both candidates are young white guys (O’Rourke is 46, Buttigieg 37), branding themselves as the bright, shiny future of the Democratic Party. Buttigieg’s explosion tracks with O’Rourke’s implosion. Any hopes O’Rourke has of rising again may depend on Buttigieg collapsing, which he shows no signs of doing; his polling has remained decent, and he raised $24.8 million for the second quarter, more than anyone else running.
“What Beto O’Rourke’s Dad Taught Him About Losing.” Well, that’s knowledge that’s going to come in handy…
Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. Unveiled a manucaturing plan that also includes the $15 an hour minimum wage hike, which we already know is a job killer. “Two longtime Biden African American supporters in S. Carolina defect to Tim Ryan.” “Fletcher Smith and Brandon Brown, who played senior roles in Biden’s last presidential campaign in 2008” are the defectees. Given that the Biden 2008 Presidential campaign didn’t even survive long enough to get to South Carolina, it’s hard to see them as must-hire material…
“Whatever you think about Sweden and what we did, you have to realize that we had a great society first,” Johan Norberg, a Swedish historian, filmmaker, and Cato Institute senior fellow, said in a recent lecture titled “No, Bernie! Scandinavia Is Not Socialist!”
“We were incredibly wealthy, we trusted each other socially, there was a decent life for everybody. That’s what made it possible to experiment with socialism; then it began to undermine many of those preconditions,” Norberg said during the June 20 event hosted by The Fund for American Studies and the office of Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.
“That’s the one thing that it’s important for people to get, because if they just look at Sweden and think, ‘Oh look, they’re socialist and seem to be doing quite all right,’ then they’ve sort of missed the point,” Norberg added.
Tom Steyer’s eleventh-hour presidential bid is confounding Democrats. And some party officials are ready for him to butt out.
The billionaire environmental activist is antagonizing Democratic leaders, whacking Speaker Nancy Pelosi for going on August recess and criticizing House Democrats for not immediately impeaching the president.
And as Steyer vows to spend as much as $100 million of his own money in the primary to boost his long-shot candidacy, Democrats are growing frustrated that he’ll only further clog the crowded campaign — particularly if he can buy his way onto the debate stage this fall.
“It’s very difficult for me to see the path for Tom Steyer to be a credible candidate,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), who has endorsed Pete Buttigieg. “So yes, I would rather that he spend his money taking back the Virginia House, the Virginia Senate and supporting people who can win.”
“I wish he wouldn’t do it. Especially at this late date,” added Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), who has endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden. “Things are set except for those who are going to drop out.”
Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio observed that Steyer is basically “another white guy in the race,” albeit a wealthy one who is “a major progressive player.” Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia was mostly perplexed by the wealthy Californian’s entry when asked about it: “I kind of wonder why?”
Evidently Senator Brown doesn’t realize that he’s also the other white meat. But notice how he automatically lapses into the racist identity politics framing that infects the Democratic Party today. Whatever happened to judging people on the content of their character? There’s a whole lot of reasons not to vote for Tom Steyer without mentioning the color of his skin. “How Democratic debate rules are forcing a billionaire to plead for pennies.”
About one-fifth of Steyer’s TV spending is on the national airwaves, but the vast majority is concentrated in the four early caucus and primary states: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. Positive poll results specifically in those states could help Steyer qualify for the debate, so getting his face on television is of special strategic value there.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Unveiled a plan to renegotiate trade deals. A small number of good transparency ideas attached to a giant boat anchor of liberal interest group ideas, including a “border carbon adjustment” tax. Her trade plans make Donald Trump sound like Adam Smith. Speaking of economics, she says we’re due for a recession, so she has that in common with Zero Hedge. But economists can’t agree, and the Fed is poised to drop rates, so who knows? Dem analyst for Warren says the race is between Warren and Harris. “Ignore that frontrunner behind the curtain!”
The Democratic Party has long considered itself the standard-bearer of scientific expertise, adopting an almost utopian vision of technological innovation since at least the Kennedy years, Vinsel said.
Practically, this means that Democrats have made technology a bigger part of their image over the years. In the 1980s, for instance, “Atari Democrats” wore fancy watches and promoted Silicon Valley boosterism as an alternative to courting labor unions, said Marc Aidinoff, a history doctoral candidate at MIT who has also worked as a junior policy advisor to Joe Biden. That trend continued under Barack Obama, said Mary Ebeling, a professor of sociology at Drexel University. Obama’s technology advisors were heavily recruited from Silicon Valley and many returned there after serving in his administration. And now, it’s not just the Democratic Party pushing tech-based solutions, Vinsel said. At this point, the ideas of technological innovation and economic growth are so linked in the American mind that neither party can step away from tech as a common good without seeming like they are anti-growth.
But Democrats’ tendency to seek solutions in technology for social problems has not always served them well. Ebeling is currently working on a project that explores how adopting electronic health records as part of the Affordable Care Act affected both patients and workers in the medical industry. The electronic records were pushed as a solution to deep-seated problems that weren’t really about technology — boosters promised they’d make healthcare cheaper and solve problems with patient access to consistent medical care. Instead, Ebeling is finding that we spent billions effectively favoring an industry that could never produce the returns it promised. “And lo and behold, by 2019, you have Kaiser Health News reporting on how much harm electronic health records have caused. Literally the death of patients because of medical errors,” she said.
Says he’ll be running his campaign the entire way. Given slow but steady rise in the polls, I’d say certainly through Super Tuesday, and longer if it looks like Democrats are headed to a brokered convention, because why the hell not? “A recent Fox News poll had Yang ahead of Senators Cory Booker, D-N.J., Michael Bennet, D-Colo., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., former Colorado Gov. John Hickelnlooper, and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas.”
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Post-debate analysis, Biden is down a little, Harris is up a little, Buttigieg banks big Benjamins, Yang rises, and Williamson beams love into the cosmos. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update! And it’s absolutely packed to the gills this time.
Debate Roundup
Lots of reactions to the first two debates:
The headline out of tonight’s debate is going to be Kamala Harris starting off the second hour by turning to Joe Biden and just kicking the snot out of him on the previously long-forgotten issue of forced busing in Delaware. No older white male wants to get into a fight about racism with a younger African-American woman in a Democratic presidential primary. Biden tried to defend himself by first contrasting his work as a defense attorney with Harris’ record as a prosecutor, then moved on to a not terribly convincing, “I did not oppose busing in America; I opposed busing ordered by the Department of Education,” and then he cut himself off. Septuagenarians who have been in the Senate longer than I’ve been alive should probably avoid the term “my time is up.” Biden would have been better off defending his stance on the merits, declaring that busing kids across town to new schools away from their homes was angering parents and exacerbating racial tensions instead of healing them.
One night won’t sink the Joe Biden campaign, but boy, did he look like he had a glass jaw, and he also seems to have aged a decade since he left the vice presidency. When asked what his first priority as president would be, Biden answered that it would be defeating Donald Trump.
Snip.
It’s a shame Andrew Yang couldn’t be there tonight. . . . Oh, he was on stage? I must have blinked too many times. The man with a million ideas literally got three minutes over two hours to pitch his ideas. This is an egregious mismanagement of the debate by MSNBC, and the Yang Gang has every right to be livid over this.
I wonder if non-Republicans felt about Donald Trump in 2016 the way I, and it seems quite a few other conservatives, feel about Marianne Williamson. Marianne, you beautiful lunatic. Every time you spoke, I didn’t know whether you were going to do a rain dance, cast a hex, or hold a seance. On those rare moments you got a chance to talk, I leaned forward because I had no idea what kind of absolute insanity was going to come out of your mouth. It was as riveting as a hostage situation. She contends American have chronic illnesses because of “chemical policies,” she wonders where the rest of the field has been for decades (er, in public office), and her first call will be to the prime minister of New Zealand, and she wants to harness the power of love for political purposes. In many ways, she is exactly the candidate that today’s Democratic party deserves.
The debates were the first chance voters got to look at the latest crop of Democratic presidential contenders, and they didn’t like what they saw.
Voters see most of the Democratic presidential candidates as more liberal than they are and rate their agenda as outside the mainstream.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that just 25% of Likely U.S. Voters consider most of the announced candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination to be about the same as they are in political terms. Fifty-four percent (54%) say most of these candidates are more liberal than they are, while only 13% think they are more conservative.
Wait, health care for illegal aliens, eliminating private insurance and taxpayer subsidized abortions for trannies aren’t popular with the American public? Who knew?
Immigration and Customs Enforcement forcibly removed 256,086 people in 2018, 57 percent of whom had committed crimes since they arrived in the U.S. So that’s an annual removal rate of 2 percent of the total undocumented population of around 12 million. That means that for 98 percent of undocumented aliens, in any given year, no consequences will follow for crossing the border without papers. At the debates this week, many Democratic candidates argued that the 43 percent of deportees who had no criminal record in America should not have been expelled at all and been put instead on a path to citizenship. So that would reduce the annual removal rate of illegal immigrants to a little more than 1 percent per year. In terms of enforcement of the immigration laws, this is a joke. It renders the distinction between a citizen and a noncitizen close to meaningless.
None of this reality was allowed to intervene in the Democratic debates this week. At one point, one moderator tellingly spoke about Obama’s record of deporting “3 million Americans.” In that bubble, there were no negatives to mass immigration at all, and no concern for existing American citizens’ interests in not having their wages suppressed through this competition. There was no concession that child separation and “metering” at the border to slow the crush were both innovated by Obama, trying to manage an overwhelmed system. Candidates vied with each other to speak in Spanish. Every single one proposed amnesty for all those currently undocumented in the U.S., except for criminals. Every single one opposes a wall. There was unanimous support for providing undocumented immigrants immediately with free health care. There was no admission that Congress needed to tighten asylum law. There was no concern that the Flores decision had massively incentivized bringing children to game the system, leaving so many vulnerable to untold horrors on a journey no child should ever be forced to make.
What emerged was their core message to the world: Get here without papers and you’ll receive humane treatment while you’re processed, you’ll never be detained, you’ll get work permits immediately, and you’ll have access to publicly funded health care and a path to citizenship if you don’t commit a crime. This amounts to an open invitation to anyone on the planet to just show up and cross the border. The worst that can happen is you get denied asylum by a judge, in which case you can just disappear and there’s a 1 percent chance that you’ll be caught in a given year. Who wouldn’t take those odds?
This is in a new century when the U.S. is trying to absorb the largest wave of new immigrants in our entire history, and when the percentage of the population that is foreign-born is also near a historic peak. It is also a time when mass immigration from the developing world has destabilized liberal democracies across the West, is bringing illiberal, anti-immigration regimes to power across Europe, and was the single biggest reason why Donald Trump is president.
I’m told that, as a legal immigrant, I’m shutting the door behind me now that I’ve finally made it to citizenship. I’m not. I favor solid continuing legal immigration, but also a reduction in numbers and a new focus on skills in an economy where unskilled labor is increasingly a path to nowhere. It is not strange that legal immigrants — who have often spent years and thousands of dollars to play by the rules — might be opposed to others’ jumping the line. It is not strange that a hefty proportion of Latino legal immigrants oppose illegal immigration — they are often the most directly affected by new, illegal competition, which drives down their wages.
I’m told that I’m a white supremacist for believing in borders, nation-states, and a reduction in legal immigration to slow the pace of this country’s demographic revolution. But I support this because I want a more successful integration and Americanization of immigrants, a better future for skilled immigrants, and I want to weaken the populist and indeed racist movements that have taken the West by storm in the past few years. It’s because I loathe white supremacy that I favor moderation in this area.
When I’m told only white racists favor restrictionism, I note how the Mexican people are more opposed to illegal immigration than Americans: In a new poll, 61.5 percent of Mexicans oppose the entry of undocumented migrants, period; 44 percent believe that Mexico should remove any undocumented alien immediately. Are Mexicans now white supremacists too? That hostility to illegal immigration may even explain why Trump’s threat to put tariffs on Mexico if it didn’t crack down may well have worked. Since Trump’s bluster, the numbers have measurably declined — and the crackdown is popular in Mexico. I can also note that most countries outside Western Europe have strict immigration control and feel no need to apologize for it. Are the Japanese and Chinese “white supremacists”? Please. Do they want to sustain their own culture and national identity? Sure. Is that now the equivalent of the KKK?
The Democrats’ good ideas need to be put in contact with this bigger question if they are to win wider support. In the U.S. in the 21st century, should anyone who enters without papers and doesn’t commit a crime be given a path to citizenship? Should all adversely affected by climate change be offered a path to citizenship if they make it to the border? Should every human living in violent, crime-ridden neighborhoods or countries be granted asylum in America? Is there any limiting principle at all?
I suspect that the Democrats’ new position — everyone in the world can become an American if they walk over the border and never commit a crime — is political suicide. I think the courts’ expansion of the meaning of asylum would strike most Americans as excessively broad. I think many Americans will have watched these debates on immigration and concluded that the Democrats want more immigration, not less, that they support an effective amnesty of 12 million undocumented aliens as part of loosening border enforcement and weakening criteria for citizenship. And the viewers will have realized that their simple beliefs that borders should be enforced and that immigration needs to slow down a bit are viewed by Democrats as unthinkable bigotry.
Advantage Trump.
What Sullivan can’t say is that activists in the Democratic Party, including almost all of the 2020 Presidential candidates, do want more illegal aliens crossing the border, as they view every single one of them as a likely Democratic voter, either illegally or though amnesty.
The first question of last night’s debate, asked by Savannah Guthrie to Elizabeth Warren, was a good one: “You have many plans — free college, free child care, government health care, cancellation of student debt, new taxes, new regulations, the breakup of major corporations. But this comes at a time when 71 percent of Americans say the economy is doing well, including 60 percent of Democrats. What do you say to those who worry this kind of significant change could be risky to the economy?”
Warren answered that the public is wrong to feel that satisfaction with the economy, that the economy is only “doing great for a thinner and thinner slice at the top.” Apparently, those 71 percent of Americans have all been hypnotized or something.
A more honest answer would be that the Democratic party is interested in a drastic overhaul of the economy because of two factors relating to the outcome of the 2016 election.
First, the departure of Barack Obama from office means it is safer for Democrats to openly discuss how his presidency disappointed them. Think back to how much wild optimism surrounded Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency in 2007-2008. Think of Oprah declaring that he was “the one.” Think of the massive crowds chanting, “O-ba-ma!” Think of the downright messianic coverage of Obama. Many Democrats genuinely believed that Obama’s election would usher in a golden age.
Different Democrats will give Obama different grades, but many would acknowledge that on some level they were disappointed by the outcome of his presidency — if for no other reason, the gradual decimation of the Democratic party at the local, state, and national levels from 2009 to 2016. George Soros called Barack Obama “my greatest disappointment.”
Matt Stoller contends Obama was far too cozy with big corporations and backed bailouts. The Affordable Care Act turned out to be a much more mixed bag than Democrats expected. As Michael Brendan Dougherty observed, last night ten Democrats discussed health care at length and never mentioned Obamacare.
Obama’s inability to deliver what Democrats truly wanted — and Democrats’ unwillingness to reexamine whether their expectations are realistic — leaves them wanting bigger, bolder changes. If the stimulus, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank didn’t do it, then the only thing that will is having the federal government cover the costs of every major expenditure in Americans’ lives — health care, college education, child care, etcetera.
He also says that Republicans’ inability to even pretend to care about deficits has emboldened Democrats to ask for everything as though they had infinite money.
Positive and negative impressions of the candidates following the debates. Biden’s negatives went up and his positives went down…but his positives are still higher than Harris (though now ever-so-slightly behind Sanders).
Politico says that, following he debates, the primary is now wide open, because that’s the sort of headline political reporters always want to right after the first debate. I suspect pundits are overstating the case to how badly Biden has been bloodied or Sanders surpassed by the hard-left female candidate they favor.
Video roundup from The Five:
Senator John Kennedy (the living Republican from Louisiana, not the dead Democrat from Massachusetts), said the Democratic debates were a clear win for Castro. Fidel, that is. “I know many of the candidates running, but I felt like I was listening to folks who were Castro without the beard, or Cuba without the sun.”
Morning Consult: Biden 33, Sanders 19, Harris 12, Warren 12, Buttigieg 6, Booker 3, O’Rourke 2, Yang 2, Bullock 1, Castro 1, de Blasio 1, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Gillibrand 1, Klobuchar 1, Moulton 1, Ryan 1. That’s good news for Harris and Yang, bad news for Biden (down 5, but still the frontrunner), O’Rourke and Castro.
Gravis (Maine primary): Biden 27, Warren 17, Sanders 15, Uncertain 11, Buttigieg 8, Yang 5, Ryan 4, Booker 3, Williamson 3, “Bennett” 2, Harris 2, O’Rourke 1, Swalwell 1, Gillibrand 1. Seems Maine likes Massachusetts liberals more than Vermont socialists. Of course, Maine used to be part of Massachusetts before becoming a state as part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, when [long, tedious historical digression excised].
(From here on down pre-debate polls)
Economist/YouGov: Biden 24, Warren 18, Sanders 15, Harris 7, Buttigieg 5, Gabbard 3, O’Rourke 3, Booker 2, Bennet 1, Bullock 1, Castro 1, de Blasio 1, Gillibrand 1, Klobuchar 1, Moulton 1, Yang 1. That’s the highest I’ve seen Gabbard.
Emerson: Biden 34, Sanders 27, Warren 14, Harris 7, Buttigieg 6, Booker 3, Gillibrand 1, O’Rourke 1, Klobuchar 1, Yang 1, Inslee 1, Gravel 1. That’s as high as I’ve ever seen Sanders, but it’s pre-debate and a small sample size (457).
Fundraising
Lots of candidates claimed they got a bump off their debate performances, and we finally have our first Q2 number:
Buttigieg says he raised nearly $25 million in Q2. That is a huge, impressive haul for someone that’s not even in the top three, much less a frontrunner. That’s just under where Sanders was in a two-man race in Q2 2015. This suggests that a lot of big money donors are disastisfied with both Biden and his primary hard-left opponents. Buttigieg is in until Iowa and probably beyond.
Harris says she raised $2 million following the debates.
“Castro sees strongest fundraising day post-Democratic debate.” “Over Wednesday and Thursday, the campaign raised 3,266 percent more money than it had the previous two days, according to the statement.” Absent a baseline, this jump if sort of meaningless. Maybe he pulled in all of $20 the previous two days…
“Inslee’s campaign said in a press release it enjoyed a record number of donations in a 24-hour period following his appearance in the debate Wednesday night, though it did not specify how much it had actually raised.” Sensing a pattern here.
“Dem debates spark fundraising gusher for breakout stars. The Democratic digital fundraising platform ActBlue raised $6.9 million on Thursday alone — the party’s biggest day in more than two months.” Are there individual candidate numbers? There are not.
Finally some numbers here, though a lot of it is rumors, guesswork and speculation.
Warren has built up one of the biggest campaign operations of any candidate, rapidly hiring experienced staffers in early primary and caucus states. In the first three months of 2019 alone, she spent nearly $1.9 million of the $6 million she raised to hire and retain more than 160 people.
Since then, that number has swelled upward of 200 and she’ll need to show that she’s raising the money to keep her operation going. Still, her campaign finances have been bolstered in part by a $10.4 million transfer from her Senate campaign committee, and her growing political support bodes well for her second-quarter haul.
Snip.
So far, all signs point to a massive second-quarter haul for Biden. He’s devoted a substantial portion of his time to attending high-dollar fundraisers in traditional donor hubs such as New York, Los Angeles and Washington.
He hinted earlier this month that he had raised nearly $20 million up to that point, and some prominent donors expect him to report as much as $25 million this quarter.
Two weeks ago that might have looked impressive, but now the frontrunner merely tieing Mayor Pete is not going to get it done.
Pundits, etc.
“This One New Poll of Democrats Explains Why Donald Trump Will Be Reelected. Just 25 percent of Democratic voters want a candidate promising a “bold, new agenda,” which is exactly what party and media elites will cram down their throats.”
One of the questions asked Democratic voters whether they will vote for a candidate with a “bold, new agenda” or one “who will provide steady, reliable leadership.” Fully three-quarters of respondents want the latter, with just 25 percent interested in the sort of “bold, new agenda” that virtually all Democratic candidates are peddling so far. This finding is consistent with other polling that shows that Democratic voters are far more moderate than their candidates. Even allowing for a doubling of self-described Democrats who identify as liberal over the past dozen years, Gallup found last year that 54 percent of Democrats support a party that is “more moderate” while just 41 percent want one that is “more liberal.”
Yet with the exception of Joe Biden (more on him in a minute), all of the Democratic candidates—certainly the leading ones—are pushing a massively expansionist agenda, thus putting themselves at odds with their own base. Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All would cost $37 trillion in new spending over a decade and his free-college plan would cost the federal government about $47 billion a year. He plans to spend much, much more, as does Elizabeth Warren, who is running on promises to spend $3.3 trillion over a decade in new giveaways that will be paid for by an unworkable, probably unconstitutional “wealth tax” that will at best raise $2.75 trillion.
“How the Democrats Could Blow the Election Over Health Care.” Notable for being from lefty Daily Beast, not notable in that it’s a “Members Only” story, so I guess I’ll never know how “these positions stand to lose the Democrats votes. Lots of votes.” Though I think I have an idea…
All those big Democratic plans? Fugitaboutit. “The Democrats have no plan for ‘Cocaine Mitch.'”
Now on to the clown car itself:
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? She’s evidently highly in demand as a speaker and consultant. But: “Does the Stacey Abrams method — a charismatic figure painstakingly courting disadvantaged and often-ignored voters — really work for anyone besides Stacey Abrams?”
In the end, Abrams came within fewer than 60,000 votes of becoming the first black woman to lead Georgia, or any other state for that matter, in a much better showing than the usual 200,000-vote loss for Democrats in Georgia. Republicans say a loss is still a loss; they call her complaints of voter suppression sour grapes, and the notion that she represents some brilliant new Democratic future a fantasy.
To me, it was clearly Biden. I didn’t like Harris’s attack on Biden when I was experiencing it emotionally, watching TV late at night, and I don’t like it now, as I examine the transcript this morning. She yelled at him, and she would have won if he had broken down and just yelled at her or if he’d gotten confused and said something wrong. But he made sense, and though I could see on TV that he was aggravated by the attack, on the page, he’s completely lucid. He gets his points in and the points are sound. That’s all I need him to do. I am not won over by Harris’s “That little girl was me” pathos or her prosecutorial aggression. But maybe a lot of people think she won the night. It didn’t work on me. I woke up this morning with an okay, it’s Biden feeling.
The Georgian-style home — from the front a brick version of the White House — once belonged to Alexander Haig, the former secretary of state. Nestled on a wooded lot in McLean, the nearly 12,000-square-foot residence has five bedrooms and 10 bathrooms, marble fireplaces, a gym and a sauna.
“Surrounded by Washington elite and sitting high above the Potomac River, there is an undeniable grandeur in the design of this home,” said the British-accented agent in a video released when it went on the market in 2015. “This property makes an imposing statement with parking for over 20 cars and creates a perfect setting for the most lavish of events.
“This may have already been the residence to a very important person,” he continued. “But I suspect it will be home to many more.”
It is currently home to Joe Biden. He and his wife, Jill, rented it after leaving the vice presidential quarters at the Naval Observatory in 2017. The house had been purchased for $4.25 million in June 2016 by Mark Ein, a wealthy venture capitalist who lives next door.
Biden points out on the presidential campaign trail that he was often the poorest member of the U.S. Senate and, for at least a decade, has referred to himself as “Middle Class Joe.” But since leaving office he has enjoyed an explosion of wealth, making millions of dollars largely from book deals and speaking fees for as much as $200,000 per speech, public documents show.
Snip.
Since leaving the vice presidency, Biden has rented the McLean home and purchased a $2.7 million, 4,800-square-foot vacation house near the water in Rehoboth Beach, Del., to go along with his primary residence, the nearly 7,000-square-foot lakeside home he built more than two decades ago in Wilmington, Del.
Let he who has never owned two 4,000 square foot homes and rented a third cast the first stone. Also:
Biden released his tax returns in the past but has not done so since 2016, his last year as vice president. He has vowed to release the current ones as part of this campaign. A financial disclosure required of presidential candidates would have provided the first window into the financial boost he has received since leaving the vice presidency. The deadline for that document was set for last month, but Biden filed for an extension until July 9.
(Hat tip: Ann Althouse, who also notes that Biden’s speech riders obligate hosts to serve him the exact same Italian meal every time: “angel hair pomodoro, a caprese salad, topped off with raspberry sorbet with biscotti.”) This is an interesting look state of the Democratic Party that Biden participated in the 1970s. “By the 1970s, opposition to ‘busing’ was strongest in Democratic strongholds, cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago, New York and Baltimore — as well as Biden’s own Delaware.” Lindsey Graham: “Underestimate Joe Biden at your own peril.” Also says about Harris: “She is very talented, she’s very smart, and she’ll be a force to be reckoned with.” He’s not necessarily wrong with either assessment…
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Booker wants Biden to confess his racial sins. It’s an interesting approach for someone polling at 2%, which is even less than Biden was polling at going into the 2008 Iowa caucuses. A guy down in that range is usually thinking about possibly being a VP pick than taking down the frontrunner. Similarly unusual is his white knighting for Harris. Usually you’re attacking the candidate in your “lane.”
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. His Q2 fundraising numbers are late-breaking news, so no reactions yet. South Bends’ police union isn’t happy with him, so he has one more thing in common with Bill de Blasio. Hugh Hewett thinks Buttigieg and Harris were the winners of their debate. “Both displayed an almost effortless eloquence and command of rhetorical devices. They did not need gimmicks and appeared completely unrehearsed. They connected.” Though I take his “Biden is doomed” take with several grains of salt. Rich Lowry had a lot less rosy assessment of Buttigieg’s chances:
The elite media fell in love with Buttigieg, not just because he’s genuinely talented, but because he’s the type of candidate — young, earnest, credentialed, progressive but with a self-image as an ideologically moderate pragmatist — it always falls in love with.
It is attracted to the idea of an intellectual as a presidential candidate. This doesn’t literally mean someone with deep intellectual interests or genuine accomplishments — think the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan — but an impressive academic résumé, a copy of The New Yorker on the nightstand and true verbal acuity.
In this sense, Pete Buttigieg is the new Barack Obama, except with limits that will likely keep him from reaching the next level in the 2020 nomination contest and even if he did, would make him perhaps the weakest plausible prospective Democratic general-election candidate.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Castro is barnstroming through Texas bragging about his debate performance: “‘A few months ago they were writing me up as the other Texan,’ the former San Antonio mayor told supporters at a rally in Austin on Friday night. ‘But that’s no more. I am the Texan in this race.'” Honestly, neither his nor O’Rourke ‘s chances look particularly bright right now. Castro also did the same white knighting of Harris that Booker did. Maybe they all got the same memo…
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. Nothing says “political SUPERgenius” quite like quoting Che Guevara in Miami. He also came out for “Medicare for all” paying for “gender reassignment surgery.” I’m sure “Taxdollars for Trannies” will play super-well in helping Democrats win back states in the Midwest. But this piece suggests his entire purpose in running is to push the Democratic Party to the left. They hardly needed any help.
His plan would be a catastrophic insurance package that would cover only major, high-cost medical expenses. Everyone under the age of 65 would be enrolled, with individuals given the ability to opt-out and use a tax credit to purchase their own insurance. Those enrolled in the program would be free to purchase supplemental insurance, either individually or through their employers. His proposal calls for the new insurance system to absorb both Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies.
Since his plan doesn’t socialize medicine nearly enough for Democratic activists, expect him to continue getting ignored.
When she represented her upstate congressional district 10 years ago, Gillibrand had an “A” rating from the NRA and was against protections for sanctuary cities. She quickly changed those positions to jibe with her downstate constituents, a move that got her plenty of critique as disingenuous. That rapid evolution is part of what makes her 2020 campaign trail mix of progressivism and professed moderate appeal so interesting — it’s high-risk moderation, given that Gillibrand has already been labeled pliable to the whims of the electorate at any given moment.
(For “interesting” I’d probably substitute a phrase like “nakedly political” or “lacking moral principle.”) “‘I honestly think that Sen. Gillibrand is closer to Kirsten Gillibrand the human being than the congresswoman was,’ David Paterson, the former governor of New York who appointed Gillibrand to her Senate seat told me.” Oh, that makes it all better! “Of course you have to lie to those gun-toting upstate rubes from JesusLand! She’s really one of us.” Gillibrand is all in on abortion (just in case you were unclear on that), including wanting to repeal the partial-birth abortion ban, but her own campaign is so moribund I doubt it makes it to the third trimester…
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: In. Twitter. Facebook. Mike Gravel is the anti Joe Biden, by which I guess they mean he’ll never be a Presidential frontrunner. He spends a good deal of the interview yammering on about a “Legislature of the People,” which is some sort of direct democracy scheme that would require a constitutional amendment. It takes a certain kind of mind to come up with a proposal even less likely to be enacted than “Medicare for all” or the “Green New Deal”…
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Of all the many, many, many potential issues Harris could attack Biden over, possibly the most inexplicable is forced busing.
1) It is unconstitutional and bad policy to assign students to public schools on the basis of their skin color.
2) This means that Jim Crow segregation was unconstitutional and bad policy; it also means that racial balancing of schools (which I have no doubt is now supported to one degree or another by all the Democratic presidential candidates, including both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris) is unconstitutional and bad policy.
It wasn’t just unconstitutional, it was widely hated by the school districts it was inflicted on. Forced busing tore communities apart, engendered white flight, threatened the integrity of public school systems, and shifted suburban voters sharply towards the Republican Party. Biden was right when he called forced busing inherently racist.
The new integration plans being offered are really just quota systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos, or whatever in each school,” he said in the same interview. “That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with. What it says is, ‘In order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son.’ That’s racist! Who the hell do we think we are, that the only way a black man or woman can learn is if they rub shoulders with my white child?”
Despite Harris’ claims, huge numbers of parents opposed forced busing for reasons other than racism:
The implication is that all those “working-class Democrats” in Delaware who demanded that Biden take a firm stand against busing were racists, and so were all the other parents across the country who objected to a policy that forced their kids, because of their skin color, to take long bus rides to unfamiliar neighborhoods in the name of racial equality. Yet according to a 1978 RAND Corporation study of the demographic shifts spurred by mandatory busing, “racism does not explain white flight.” The study cited survey data indicating that most whites who opposed busing simply preferred schools in their neighborhood, mentioning “issues such as distance, loss of choice, lost time, and lost friends.” And “when asked about the benefits and harms of desegregation, a large majority of white parents believed it would improve neither minority education nor race relations, while it would increase discipline problems and racial tensions.” In other words, “most white parents believe they are being forced to give up something they value—the neighborhood school—in return for a policy that benefits no one and may even being harmful.”
Most black parents took a different view, but that does not mean the white parents’ concerns were illegitimate or covers for racism. The RAND report noted that “the vast majority of whites accept desegregated schools when brought about by voluntary methods but reject them when their children are mandatorily bused or reassigned to schools outside their neighborhoods.” The study also cited data indicating that “whites with low racial prejudice scores were nearly as opposed to busing as persons with high prejudice.”
As fundamentally dishonest as Harris’ busing attack may have been, her social justice warrior tactic may end up working because it might achieve a primary goal to help her nab the nomination: make Biden unacceptable to black voters, no matter how much collateral damage she inflicts on the Democratic Party (and the nation) in the process. Even Harris’ former paramour Willie Brown thinks she can’t beat Trump:
The first Democratic debates proved one thing: We still don’t have a candidate who can beat Donald Trump.
California Sen. Kamala Harris got all the attention for playing prosecutor in chief, but her case against former Vice President Joe Biden boiled down in some ways to a ringing call for forced school busing. It won’t be too hard for Trump to knock that one out of the park in 2020.
Trump must have enjoyed every moment and every answer, because he now knows he’s looking at a bunch of potential rivals who are still not ready for prime time.
Listening to Hickenlooper, it seemed to me that there was something else that bothered him about the socialist idea that he was not quite putting into words. He seemed drawn to projects in which people could take action on their own behalf, that existed at the human scale: the bottom-up economic plan, designed around what nurses and small-business owners wanted for their town. A brewpub that could revive a neighborhood; an ambitious light-rail project that helped connect Denver to its suburbs, which he had accomplished through diligent personal lobbying of suburban politicians; an apprenticeship program built through coöperation with Colorado’s business leaders, so that teen-agers who were not headed directly for college would graduate with “skills and a sense of direction.” What seemed to spook him about socialism was an implied passivity. “That rut of thinking that government’s going to solve all our problems,” he said. “I think, as long as we’re demonizing business, as long as we’re saying we have all the answers—the rest of you just wait while we provide you all the answers—I think we’re going to have problems.”
Hickenlooper’s entire campaign summarized in one incident:
Security person outside debate site just now : “are you here to pick up press credentials?” John Hickenlooper: “…I’m a candidate”
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Amy Klobuchar made a mark in the first Democratic debate, but was it enough?” A skidmark, perhaps. She went into the debate with zero momentum and went out the same way. Weirdly, her campaign’s popularity seemed to peak at the same time everyone was writing articles about how she abused her aides. “Amy Klobuchar owned Jay Inslee on abortion rights at the Democratic debate.” That’s like Kramer dominating his karate class.
Shortly after gaining office back in 2015, Messam spoke out in support of local legislation that would have seen small amounts of cannabis decriminalized in the county his jurisdiction resides in.
“We have to ensure our city doesn’t become a place where lives are destroyed due to recreational possession of marijuana while providing real rehabilitation options that offer offenders resources to avoid a life of drug addiction and bad choices,” Messam said in a Facebook post.
I think Hickenlooper and Inslee both missed the boat by not becoming notable pro-pot candidates. As governors of legal pot states, they could have made the case for legalization and generated buzz for their campaigns that has been sorely lacking. (“Heh heh heh. He said ‘buzz!'” “Shut up, Beavis!”)
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. Another guy with a lot of “he missed the debates” articles. He visited a gay pride parade in New Hampshire. Given his lack of attention and funding, he could do a lot worse than an “All in on New Hampshire” strategy. At least he could drive to all the events…
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. A look behind the O’Rourke-castro tiff and Section 1325 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. With the two now polling more evenly, the Texas porimary is now wide open. Vanity Fair wonders if Castro dealt him a fatal blow. Probably not, because his campaign was already stumbling lisstlessly down a trash-strewn alley. Believe it or not, O’Rourke actually came up with a novel idea: A small “war tax” on households where no one has ever done military service. Shades of Robert A. Heinlein! But I don’t see that idea gaining a lot of traction among Democrats. He and Castro had dueling Austin rallies.
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Sanders thinks he won both debates. Of course he does. WSJ thinks Sanders “won” the debate by pushing Democrats to the left. “President Trump is a lucky man. Typically a re-election campaign is a referendum on the incumbent, and Mr. Trump is losing that race. But the Democrats are moving left so rapidly that they may let him turn 2020 into a choice between his policy record and the most extreme liberal agenda since 1972 (which may be unfair to George McGovern).” He came out against forced busing. Maybe the super secret social justice warrior plan to take over America is to push the Democrats so far to the left on race issues that Bernie Sanders looks like a voice of moderation by comparison. He and Warren’s student debt plans make no sense.
Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets an interview with The National Interest. His take on a possible war with Iran is presumably well-informed by his navy experience:
With an intricate knowledge that rivals any of the other contenders, Joe Sestak described in detail the difficulties the United States would have if it used a military strike against Iran. “[I]t would take us weeks if not months to destroy it [their nuclear facilities] if we go full bore to do so. Because part of it…is buried under three hundred feet of rock, hard rock.”
A war with Iran would imperil our strategic naval positioning in the area and force us out of the gulf. “We cannot survive in the Persian Gulf with our aircraft carriers. I know, I’ve operated there. There are about two places that we operate because the depth of water to do fight operations is the best right there. Our sonar doesn’t work there in the Persian Gulf and we cannot find their nineteen midget submarines at all. So, we will withdrawal our carrier groups out of the Strait of Hormuz before we even begin to think about striking and have to do it from a greater distance.” While the United States is flying air sorties and launching Tomahawk missiles on Iranian positions, they have the strength to return fire in kind. “[T]hey can rain hundreds of long-range missiles on Israel and our regional bases there.”
California Representative Eric Swalwell: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a smallishWashington Post profile, as befits his campaign’s stature. Gets a Polifact profile, which lists one endorsement (Arizona Congressman Ruben Gallego), and that he’s known as “the Snapchat king of Congress.” Well, Anthony Weiner isn’t there anymore…
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a People profile: “Williamson was raised Jewish in Houston and still practices today. Her teachings and writing draw from multiple religious practices, sometimes referencing Jesus and Buddha, and the book that inspired her spirituality, A Course in Miracles, is heavily influenced by Christianity.” “Marianne Williamson is the Kanye West of the Democratic Party, a hard to reconcile mix of truth, depth and kookiness that can baffle and lead to as much harm as good.”
A couple of weeks ago, I drank human blood and ate human flesh. It was an expression of my belief in a higher power. No one mocked me for living out my faith the way Christians do, and yet many others have been mocking Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson since Thursday night’s debate.
I wasn’t stuck near the summit of Mt. Everest and forced to become a cannibal in a desperate attempt to survive. It was a voluntary act to acknowledge that I was “born again” and freed from my sins. I was in my Christian church in South Carolina during a normal Sunday service taking what we call communion, an exercise in which we drink a juice and eat a wafer that we are told to imagine are the literal blood and body of Jesus Christ.
Snip.
If you understood the faith, you’d understand the power and beauty of those beliefs, we argue. And yet, when it comes to Williamson’s new age spirituality, we don’t hesitate to think her strange — even if we haven’t taken the time to understand her. Those of faith should remember that we live in glass houses, that it’s as easy for others to deem us whackos as it is for us to condemn others to that kind of mockery.
The debates produced lots of awesome tweets about Williamson:
It’s like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin for the healing crystal set. “Republicans Donate To Marianne Williamson To Keep Her In Democratic Debates.” BattleSwarm commentor T Migratorious made an interesting point: “The other thing that set her apart from the rest of the candidates was her lack of anger. I sense that a lot of Democrats and many more swing voters are tired of the Dems constant rage and are willing to give someone who is calmer and kinder a second look.”
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Here’s a New York Post piece by Mary Kay Linge that notes Yang gained over 100,000 Twitter followers after the debate, and even quotes Your Humble Blogger. Yang claims his mic was not on so he couldn’t jump in to other candidates answers. A better question is why anyone but the designated speaker’s mic was on during these exchanges. How about you let one person speak at a time and provide a level playing field rather than playing favorites? Calls for “human-centered capitalism“:
In his book The War on Normal People, Yang defines human-centered capitalism as an update to or the next stage of classical capitalism. Contemporary American culture, Yang argues, imagines capitalism as a natural fit for the human condition, especially when compared to the centralized mechanisms of socialism. In turn, our culture tends to view the two as binary, almost Manichaean, opposites.
But these cultural arguments often miss some important points, including: Capitalism is not natural, and Western societies have experimented with many economic systems; there has never been a pure, laissez-faire capitalist system; and our form of corporate capitalism is but one of many.
So how do we know if laissez-faire capitalist works if we’ve never tried it? “Andrew Yang’s Proposals Aren’t As Popular In Silicon Valley As You Might Think.” (Actually, I’ve long thought he was regarded as a fringe candidate there as well.) “It’s expected that [Universal Basic Income] would cost more than $3 trillion annually. For perspective’s sake, the proposed federal budget for 2020 is $4.746 trillion.” And the idea that we’ll just “consolidate” a lot of existing programs down into UBI ignores the sad fact that welfare programs are historically harder to kill than Thanos. But Yang did offer this:
I’ve noticed that conservatives often follow liberals on Twitter – but the reverse does not seem to be true.
You would think a simple condemnation of antisemitism would be an easy thing for House Democrats to do. You’d be wrong. Like the UK’s Labour Party, the Social Justice Warrior rot has crept into the Democrats to the point where they are institutionally hostile to Israel and Jews. The need for Muslim votes outweighs forthright condemnation of one of the world’s oldest (and deadliest) prejudices.
So enjoy a LinkSwarm while you wait for the blood-red tide of anarchy to be loosed on the world:
The Democratic Party Has Normalized Anti-Semitism: “No educated human believes [Democratic Rep. Ilhan] Omar inadvertently accused “Benjamin”-grubbing Rootless Cosmopolitans of hypnotizing the world for their evil. These are long-standing, conspiratorial attacks on the Jewish people, used by anti-Semites on right and left, and popular throughout the Islamic world.” (Hat tip: Sean Davis on Twitter.)
And the hits keep coming! New York Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls for and end to the U.S.-Israel special relationship. I’m sure such a position could never negatively impact reelection chances for a congresswoman representing New York City…
“Federal judge temporarily blocks Texas from purging voters in citizenship review. U.S. District Judge Fred Biery called the review “ham-handed” and ordered counties not to remove any voters from the rolls without his approval and “a conclusive showing that the person is ineligible to vote.” I know it will shock you to learn that Biery is a Clinton appointee. Can’t purge those precious illegal alien votes for Democrats off the rolls…
“Last week a new pro-illegal alien organization launched in the Lone Star State: Texans for Economic Growth. The group, which appears to contain more chambers of commerce than actual businesses, is directly tied to Partnership for a New American Economy, a “comprehensive immigration reform” (pro-amnesty) organization headed by two billionaires, the anti-gun former Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg and News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch; a host of other media elites; big business CEOs; and mayors.” They oppose ending state subsidies for illegal aliens.
Is Pakistan finally doing something about terrorism? “Pakistan intensified its crackdown against Islamist militants on Thursday, with the government announcing it had taken control of 182 religious schools and detained more than 100 people as part of its push against banned groups.” Don’t believe it. As sure as the heat is off, expect those same militants to be released and go right back on the ISI payroll…
Saying "the USSR did not built its economy up through Indigenous genocide, stolen lands, and extensive use of slave labour" is like saying "At least Hitler came to power without antisemitism and violence."
It’s ten years since Obama’s Russian reset. “By the time Trump took office, just over two years ago, a greatly emboldened Russia had effectively digested Crimea, was engaged on a rapidly expanding scale in joint military exercises with China, was energetically cultivating such clients in the Western Hemisphere as the USSR’s old comrade Cuba and Putin’s pals in Venezuela, and was militarily entrenched in Syria as a mainstay of the Assad regime.”
Crenshaw might be the congressional GOP’s best answer to AOC, but he decidedly doesn’t want to be seen as a Republican version of the 29-year-old New York Democrat, who is “always trying to embrace radicalism,” he told me during a recent interview in his new office on the fourth floor of the Cannon House Office Building. He wants to take his party in a more traditional—not radical—direction. “We have to make conservatism cool and exciting again,” is how he described his mission in politics when I first met him a year ago. “We have to bring back that Reagan optimism.”
Crenshaw’s combination of traditional conservatism and rising popularity put him in an unusual position in Congress. He describes himself as a “plain old conservative”—he supports free trade, wants to reform Medicare and Social Security, and thinks American troops should stay in Afghanistan (where an IED took one of the veteran’s eyes) as long as they’re needed to prevent another 9/11. That puts him at odds with Trump, whom Crenshaw has been unafraid to criticize, going so far as to call his rhetoric “insane” and “hateful” during the 2016 presidential campaign. But Crenshaw is more “Sometimes Trump” than “Never Trump.” He is not pushing for a 2020 Republican primary challenge and is not trying to write off Trump’s wing of the party—hence, his warm reception at CPAC. In fact, Crenshaw has praised the president for his policies on immigration, even recently voting in support of Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to build a border wall, a move many conservatives opposed.
Ignore the “dares to take on Trump” angle of the article. Crenshaw’s biggest advantage is a temperament almost completely opposite from Trump’s, which voters may look for in 2024.
Former Texas congressman Ralph Hall died at age 95. Hall was a conservative Democrat who endorsed George W. Bush for President in 2000, then switched to the GOP in 2004, one of the last conservative Democratic office holders to leave the party. “Hall had always been a thorn in Democrats’ side even before he changed parties. In 1985, he voted ‘present’ rather than support then-Speaker Thomas ‘Tip’ O’Neill’s, D-Mass., reelection. ”
Two years ago, Wonder Woman proved a female-led superhero movie could reach the highest levels of the genre, with Gal Gadot proving robust and redoubtable, yet also charming and feminine. I spent Captain Marvel waiting for Gadot. What I got was Brie Larson: charmless, humorless, a character so without texture that she might as well be made out of aluminum.
Captain Marvel might be the first blockbuster movie whose animating idea is fear. Every page of the script betrays terror of what people might say about the film on social media. Give Carol Danvers a love interest? Eek! No, women can’t be defined by the men in their lives! Make her vulnerable? OMG, no, that’s crazy. Feminine? What century are you from if you think females should be feminine? Toward the end of the movie, when a villain preparing for an epic confrontation with Carol, the fighter pilot turned Superwoman, chides her that she will fail because she can’t control her emotions, there is no tension whatsoever. We’ve just spent two hours watching her be utterly unfazed by anything. Giving Carol actual emotions would, of course, lead to at least 27 people calling the film misogynist on Twitter, and directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are petrified of that.
Just to be completely, unerringly, let’s-bubble-wrap-the-universe safe, Boden and Fleck decided to make Danvers stronger than strong, fiercer than fierce, braver than brave. Larson spends the entire movie being insouciant, kicking butt, delivering her lines in an I-got-this monotone and staring down everything with a Blue Steel gaze of supreme confidence. Superheroes are defined by their limitations — Superman’s Kryptonite, Batman’s mortality — but Captain Marvel is just an invincible bore. The screenplay by Boden, Fleck, and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, with a story by the three of them plus Nicole Perlman and Meg LeFauve, presents us with Brie Larson’s Carol being amazingly strong and resilient at the beginning, middle, and end. This isn’t an arc, it’s a straight line.
“Ilhan Omar Withdraws Support From Bill To Save The Earth After Learning That’s Where Israel Is.” “When I made the Green New Deal, I thought weather like storms and earthquakes were all caused by climate change, but now I’ve learned from Representative Omar that lots of that is actually from Jewish-controlled weather machines.”
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity…
(@EvanAKilgore) 
Eggs are UP 46.8%.
commies, and Beto’s acid trip ends. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
(see also that “